MEI heads into its September 3 earnings report with short sellers aggressively rebuilding positions into a stock that has already gained 31% in a month.
The short interest story is the defining tension this week. Shorts have climbed to 8.9% of the free float — up 21% in a single week and 35% over the past month. That puts the short position at its highest level in the 30-day window covered by the data. The speed of the build is notable: from roughly 2.3 million shares shorted in late July to 3.1 million by September 1, a near-40% expansion in less than six weeks. Yet the borrow market tells a different story about conviction. Availability remains extremely loose at 756% — meaning there are more than seven times as many shares available to borrow as are currently borrowed — and the cost to borrow runs at just 0.59%, a fraction above its recent floor. With such ample supply and negligible cost, the short build looks less like a hard squeeze setup and more like an unconstrained directional bet ahead of earnings.
Options positioning adds a nuanced layer. Call interest is running notably stronger than puts, with the put/call ratio at 0.34 — slightly below its 20-day average of 0.36 and just half a standard deviation below that mean. At its 52-week low of 0.064 and high of 0.847, current readings sit well into the middle of the range. The picture is one of relative calm on the options side: neither aggressive upside speculation nor defensive hedging. Short sellers are building positions through the lending market, not through puts — which makes the short rebuild stand out as the cleaner signal going into the print.
The Street is divided, but tilting positive. The consensus carries a single buy rating, from Barrington Research (Outperform, $25 target, initiated late June after the stock's prior earnings-driven spike). Baird's analyst has stayed at Neutral, though he doubled his target to $16 in late June after previously running at $8.50. Sidoti moved the other way, downgrading from Buy to Neutral with a $17 target. At the current price of $18.32, MEI has already traded through most analyst targets, which creates a natural ceiling for near-term upgrades unless the September print delivers a fresh catalyst. The forward earnings yield is thin at 0.7%, the trailing P/E a distorted 139x, and the EV/EBITDA ratio has expanded roughly 4 turns over the past 30 days as the stock re-rated sharply. Price-to-book, at 1.0x, remains the most grounded valuation anchor for a company still working through challenged fundamentals.
The earnings history is the context that makes this week genuinely charged. MEI's most recent comparable print, in late June 2026, sent the stock up 46% in a single session and 17% over the following five days. The print before that produced a 34% one-day gain. Those are extraordinary moves for an electronic components maker — and they explain why short sellers are rebuilding so forcefully ahead of a repeat test, and why the stock has already run 31% in a month just on anticipation. Whether the September 3 result can sustain that pattern, or whether the recent strength has front-run the outcome entirely, is the question the positioning data leaves open.
With peers like GLW and INVZ slightly weaker on the week and KN up just 2%, MEI's 14% weekly gain stands as an outlier in the sector — and the September 3 earnings release is where that divergence will either be validated or unwound.
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