SPCX ends the week with a positioning picture that has violently contradicted itself inside 48 hours — a record short rebuild on Tuesday followed by a 2.2% bounce on Wednesday, with options traders now more defensively positioned than at any point in the stock's history.
The short interest story dominates everything else this week. Tuesday's data showed 159.5 million shares short — up 48% in a single session from 107.8 million the day before. That is the largest one-day short build since the stock listed. To put the reversal in context: the cover wave that ran from the August 6 peak of 232.7 million shares down to 107.8 million had been grinding for three weeks. A single session erased the majority of that progress. The new shorts entered freely. Availability is running at 79.5%, and cost to borrow has collapsed to 0.57% — down from 10.1% at the August 6 peak. Bears are not squeezed. They walked back in through an open door.
What makes the setup more charged is that options positioning moved in lockstep. The put/call ratio hit 1.15 on Tuesday — the highest reading since listing, and 2.15 standard deviations above its 20-day average of 0.97. That is a new 52-week record for downside protection demand. The combination of a record short build and a record PCR arriving on the same session is not coincidence. Something catalysed both at once. The stock's one-week move is down 3.8% to $137.95, despite Tuesday's 2.2% partial recovery, and the ORTEX short score remains elevated at 66.1 — consistent with the past two weeks and reflecting no structural improvement in the bear-pressure signals.
The Street's view sits in an awkward place relative to this positioning. Most analysts are firmly bullish: targets cluster in the $210–$250 range from Macquarie, RBC Capital, Needham, and Cantor Fitzgerald. UBS maintains a Buy at $210. Wolfe Research reiterated Outperform this morning. The mean target of $220 implies roughly 60% upside from current levels. The lone dissenter is Piper Sandler, which trimmed its target to $140 on August 5 after the post-earnings sell-off, staying at Neutral — and $140 is the closest target to where the stock actually trades. Argus upgraded to Buy on August 7, but set its target at $160, the most cautious of the bullish cohort. The bull case centres on Starlink's broadband growth, Starship's reusability roadmap, and the xAI/Grok integration. Bears point to Starship execution gaps, lockup expirations, and the regulatory uncertainty around the consumer wireless push. The EV/EBITDA multiple of 86x and a PE of 132x leave almost no margin for disappointment.
The earnings history adds one more layer of context. The most recent print on August 5 produced a 5.5% to 8.3% one-day decline across multiple data points — yet each of those same events showed a 16%+ recovery over the following five sessions. The pattern is clear: the stock tends to sell off sharply on earnings, then recover. The next event is November 5. That is the reference point the new short cohort will be trading around.
What to watch: whether the 159.5 million share short position holds, grows, or begins unwinding again — and whether the record PCR is a one-session spike or the start of a sustained defensive tilt heading into the autumn catalysts.
See the live data behind this article on ORTEX.
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