QUBT rallied 16% in a week while short sellers watch a borrow market that has essentially run dry — the core tension heading into the rest of September.
The lending picture is about as tight as it gets. Availability has been at zero for most of the past month — every share in the lending pool is already out on loan. That's the tightest borrow market in the stock's 52-week history. Cost to borrow has climbed roughly 26% over the past 30 days, reaching nearly 13%. Anyone who wants to initiate or add to a short position in QUBT right now has almost nowhere to go. Short interest remains heavy at 27.5% of the free float — around 61.7 million shares — but it has been slowly unwinding, down about 3.3% on the week and 3.6% over the past month. That steady decline in short interest, set against zero availability, tells a specific story: shorts are having trouble replacing positions as they close them, and new entrants cannot get in. The ORTEX short score reinforces this — it has climbed from 80.8 to 83.1 over the past ten sessions, reaching its highest level of the recent run. The factor scores are equally extreme: short score rank at the zeroth percentile (meaning near-maximum short pressure relative to the universe) and days-to-cover rank at just 2. Options traders are moving in the other direction. The put/call ratio fell to 0.57, more than two standard deviations below its 20-day mean — its lowest level of the past year. That's a sharp shift toward calls, consistent with traders positioning for continued upside rather than hedging against a drop.
The Street is divided, with a wide spread between the bulls and the sidelined. Ascendiant Capital lifted its target to $32 in late August, while Rosenblatt holds a $22 Buy. On the other side, Cantor Fitzgerald and Wedbush both carry Neutral ratings with targets of $10 and $12 respectively — both below the current price of $9.08. The mean price target across the coverage group comes in around $18.67, implying a notional 106% upside, but the dispersion is wide enough to make that average nearly meaningless. The bull case rests on the NeuraWave platform gaining commercial traction and a balance sheet carrying roughly $1.3 billion in cash with no debt. Bears point to deeply negative earnings power — the PE is -38.5, EV/EBITDA is -14.2 — and rising operating costs at a company that is still pre-profitability in any meaningful sense. The 90-day EPS momentum factor ranks at 66, a decent read, but the 12-month forward EPS growth rank sits at just 1 — the company's earnings trajectory is deteriorating sharply in consensus models.
One name on the 13D register is worth flagging. CEO Yuping Huang filed a Schedule 13D/A in May, and institutional data shows him holding 23.7 million shares — roughly 10.5% of the company. His August grant of 584,897 shares at near-zero exercise price is a compensation event rather than an open-market purchase, so it carries little signal on its own. More notable is BlackRock's steady accumulation: the firm added 1.6 million shares to reach 7.8% of outstanding shares in the most recent reported period, up from 5.4% disclosed earlier this year. Penserra Capital Management added the most aggressively in the institutional register, adding 3.6 million shares to reach 3.1% — consistent with passive ETF inflow into quantum-themed products. The Vanguard Group exited its stake entirely, filing a 13G/A showing zero shares after previously holding 7.51% — a notable departure worth monitoring if the quantum-theme ETF landscape reshuffles. As always, 13D/G positions are as-last-disclosed around the 5% threshold, and holders dropping below that level may not file again.
Peers broadly moved in the same direction this week, though with less velocity. OSS gained about 9.8% and INFQ added roughly 11% — both solid moves but short of QUBT's 16% weekly gain. CAN led the peer group with a 34% weekly jump, driven by its own crypto-adjacent positioning rather than quantum themes. STX added nearly 19% on the week, though its correlation to QUBT reflects broad hardware sentiment rather than a direct read-across. The next scheduled earnings event is November 13, and the most recent print — in August — produced a modest 1.5% next-day gain after an earlier release saw the stock slip 2.5%. With borrow frozen and short interest still at 27.5% of the float, the November print is the next significant pressure test for the crowded short side.
The immediate watch point is whether availability remains at zero into October — any loosening of the borrow market would change the calculus for shorts looking to rebuild positions, while continued tightness keeps squeeze risk elevated at an already compressed level.
See the live data behind this article on ORTEX.
Open QUBT on ORTEX →ORTEX Market Intelligence content is generated by AI from a snapshot of ORTEX's proprietary data. Content is informational only and does not constitute investment advice.
