NIO arrives at its September 1 earnings release with the borrow market tightening back up, even as options positioning has grown less extreme than earlier in the week.
Availability has drifted back down to roughly 23% — meaning only one share remains available for every four already lent out — after briefly opening up to nearly 26% on August 26. That is still far from the 52-week low of 2.7%, but it reflects a lending pool that stays structurally tight. Cost to borrow jumped 25% over the past week to 0.74%, reversing the sharp drop flagged in earlier coverage. Short interest itself has eased modestly, down about 3% over the week to around 123 million shares, continuing a gradual retreat from the early-August peak near 131 million. The ORTEX short score sits at 62.8, with NIO ranking in just the 9th percentile of the universe on short positioning — 91% of stocks carry a less bearish profile. Options, meanwhile, have normalised: the put/call ratio is 0.78, barely half a standard deviation above its 20-day average of 0.77, and well below the 0.83 spike seen on August 24. Neither bulls nor bears in the options market are pressing their bets hard into the print.
The fundamental debate has not shifted materially. Bulls point to genuine EPS momentum — the 90-day estimate revision rank sits at the 99th percentile, and the 30-day rank at the 88th — suggesting analysts have been steadily lifting their forward numbers. Goldman Sachs upgraded NIO to Buy with a $7 target in July, and HSBC made a similar move in March. That said, the mean analyst price target of around $7 sits well above the current price of $4.37, reflecting the gap between where the Street thinks NIO could go and where the stock actually trades. Bears counter that NIO holds just 2% of China's passenger EV market after selling roughly 326,000 units in 2025, model launches have underwhelmed, and Barclays maintains an Underweight with a $4 target — essentially flat to current levels. Profitability remains elusive, with return on assets deeply negative and the price-to-book ratio elevated at over 7x despite the stock's weakness this year.
Peer pressure is not helping. Closest peer XPEV fell 3.2% on Friday and is down 5.6% on the week; LI slipped a similar 5.7%. NIO itself is off 5.6% for the week and 6.6% over the past month. The Chinese premium EV group is broadly under pressure, and NIO's own earnings history is a sobering backdrop: the two most recent prints each produced single-day drops of roughly 7%.
The September 1 print is therefore less a referendum on NIO's long-term technology roadmap and more a test of whether delivery volumes and margin trends can finally begin to close the gap between the analyst consensus and a stock that has spent most of 2026 moving in the wrong direction.
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