nucera Borrow Tightens Again as Short Score Holds Near Record

NCH2 enters September with its borrow market tightening once more and a short score that has barely retreated from its all-time high — a setup that has barely changed since the note filed ten days ago, yet has subtly shifted in one direction: availability has gotten worse, not better.

The borrow picture is the defining tension this week. Availability has fallen to 7%, down from around 18% at the end of August — less than one share available for every fourteen already lent out. That is a meaningful tightening in less than a week, and it reverses the brief loosening that followed the early-August extreme, when availability had dropped to almost nothing. Cost to borrow is running at 112%, having come off the wilder daily prints seen through August (it touched 340% in late July and again on August 5), but remains deeply elevated on any historical comparison and has risen roughly 20% in the past week alone. The borrow market has oscillated at stress levels for two months straight. There is no sign of a structural return of supply.

The short score reflects all of this. At 96.8, it has barely moved from the 97.3 high reached in the prior note — and the factor scores behind it are unambiguous. The days-to-cover rank and utilization rank both sit at the first and second percentile of the entire ORTEX universe respectively. The short score rank itself registers zero, placing nucera at the most bearishly positioned extreme of the tracked population. What changed slightly this week is the direction: the score had been rising every session since early August, but has now flattened and edged fractionally lower over the past four sessions. That is not a reversal — it is a pause at an extreme.

The Street has not moved. No analyst changes have been filed in recent weeks. The consensus price target of €10.41 sits roughly 33% above the current price of €7.82, a gap that signals analysts still see long-term value in nucera's electrolyser and green hydrogen franchise, even as the market has consistently voted otherwise. The EPS momentum factor score ranks in the 100th percentile on a 30-day basis — an anomaly that likely reflects estimate revisions from a depressed base rather than genuine operational momentum — while the 90-day reading sits at the 6th percentile, a more honest picture of where earnings expectations have trended. The price-to-book multiple has ticked up modestly to 1.37x, reflecting the stock's 3.6% one-month recovery, but the company remains loss-making: the PE ratio is deeply negative and the EV/EBITDA is meaningless in the current configuration.

Ownership is highly concentrated, which matters for interpreting the borrow stress. Thyssenkrupp Projekt 1 and Federico De Nora together hold 76% of shares. The Public Investment Fund of Saudi Arabia holds a further 6%. That leaves a free float of roughly 18% — and it is against that thin float that the borrow pressure is being applied. The most recent insider activity on record (February 2026) showed the CEO, CFO and CTO all making small open-market purchases near €9, but the data is now more than six months stale and carries limited weight as a current signal.

The next scheduled earnings event is December 16. Between now and then, the structure to watch is whether the brief loosening of availability that appeared at the end of August — touching 18% on August 31 before collapsing back to 7% — represents a genuine pattern of periodic supply injections, or whether the pool tightens further toward the sub-2% levels that persisted through most of August.