Short sellers have left almost nothing in the lending pool. Availability on LCID has collapsed to 0.08% — fewer than one share available for every 1,200 already borrowed. That is the tightest the borrow market has been in at least a year.
At the same time, short interest has surged to 28.1% of free float, up 14.2% over the past week and up 69% over the past month. With the stock at $3.90, down 22% in a month, the bears are winning and paying to stay in the trade.
Availability has been stuck below 1% for the past three weeks. For most of September, it has oscillated between 0.03% and 1.1%. Any fresh short position is nearly impossible to establish.
Cost to borrow sits at 7.05% annualised. That is down from 22.4% in mid-August. The rate compression is notable — even as availability dried up, the borrow rate fell. That suggests existing shorts locked in positions early, before the pool tightened further.
The ORTEX short score stands at 78.0, up from 76.4 two weeks ago. The utilisation rank sits at the 1st percentile — the tightest relative to peers in the entire coverage universe.
Here is the contradiction. The put-call ratio dropped to 1.31 on September 28. The 20-day mean is 1.85. The z-score is -3.50 — the lowest reading in 52 weeks, sitting at the annual floor of 0.97.
Options traders are buying calls into a falling stock. Short sellers are maxing out the borrow pool. Both camps are taking large positions, in opposite directions, heading into the November 6 earnings date.
KBA data from Kraftfahrt-Bundesamt shows August was the largest August for new Lucid car registrations in Germany on record (since 2023), at 26 vehicles. New battery-electric registrations in Germany also hit a record August high for the same period.
California ZEV data, from the California Energy Commission, shows Q2 2026 was the largest second quarter for Lucid ZEV sales on record (since 2022), at 1,133 vehicles.
These are factual registration counts. The KBA dataset has not yet been tested as a lead against Lucid's reported revenue — it is colour, not a forecast.
The contrast is visible: physical registrations are growing, yet the stock has lost 22% in a month. The company suspended its 2026 guidance. Bears are focused on that gap between unit delivery momentum and financial visibility.
Data summary
See the live data behind this article on ORTEX.
Open LCID 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.
