Lucid Group enters the final days of August with its borrow market telling a cautiously more permissive story — yet the short interest is nudging back up and the options market is turning more defensive, making this week's moves harder to read as any kind of clean signal.
The most notable shift from last week is in borrowing costs. Cost to borrow has now dropped to 15.7%, down roughly 30% on the week and a world away from the peak above 310% seen in mid-July. That decompression is real and ongoing. What hasn't changed is how tight the lending pool itself remains: availability is running at just 3.4%, meaning for every 100 shares already out on loan, fewer than four remain available for new shorts. That is roughly triple last week's level — availability had dropped as low as 0.16% — but still historically constrained. The lower cost to borrow reflects retreating demand, not returning supply. Shorts who want new exposure are paying less, but there isn't much room for them to add at scale.
Short interest contradicts the narrative of a clean unwind. Rather than continuing to fall, it ticked higher by around 3.6% in a single day to 55 million shares, equivalent to 17% of the free float. That is well below the mid-July peak of 66 million shares but above recent mid-August readings. The ORTEX short score, which had been easing modestly from a high of 83 on August 12, now reads 78.2 — still in elevated territory and ranking in the 3rd percentile of the universe on the short score factor. Days to cover remain near 6.2 days per the most recent FINRA settlement data, leaving any rally vulnerable to a sharp short-covering dynamic if a catalyst were to materialise.
Options positioning has turned notably more cautious. The put/call ratio retreated to 1.85 on Tuesday after touching a 52-week high of 2.46 on Monday — the most defensive reading the options market has seen all year. Even after pulling back, the ratio is running well above the 20-day average of 1.59, reinforcing that protective demand is elevated. The put/call ratio has drifted higher all month, from around 1.37 in late July to these recent extremes, and the pattern aligns with the stock's 9% weekly loss to $5.26 — the third consecutive week of meaningful declines.
On the Street, the prevailing posture is cautious without being uniformly bearish. The consensus is a hold across seven analysts. Citigroup, last week, trimmed its target to $11 while keeping its Buy rating — a sign that even the bulls are resetting expectations lower. That $11 target implies meaningful upside from the current $5.26 close, but the direction of travel in targets has been consistently downward across firms all year. The bear case centres on near-term execution gaps, uncertain demand, and repeated delivery disappointments. The bull case points to disciplined cost management and the pending Midsize platform launch, targeted for late 2026. Neither side has found a reason to move decisively in recent months.
One ownership detail worth noting: Uber Technologies added 24 million shares in the most recent reported quarter, becoming the second-largest shareholder at 9.6% after the Public Investment Fund's dominant 44.9% stake. That strategic relationship remains a key element of the bull narrative around manufacturing scale and demand creation — and a counterweight to the purely negative institutional read implied by the short positioning.
With the next earnings event flagged for early November, the weeks ahead will be focused on any delivery updates or operational news from management — and on whether the recent tick-up in short interest is the start of a fresh wave or just a brief pause in the unwind that ran through July.
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