Sable Offshore Corp arrives at the end of September with every short-side signal aligned: short interest at a multi-month high, the lending pool essentially tapped out, and the stock down 21% in a single week.
Short positioning is the defining feature of SOC right now. Short interest has climbed to 34.7% of free float, up 5% week-on-week and 16% over the past month. That is not a crowded trade that crept up slowly; it has accelerated materially through September. The ORTEX short score confirms this, reading 73.7 as of Tuesday, the highest level recorded in the available history and up from 72.1 just two weeks ago. The score ranks in the 3rd percentile of the universe, meaning virtually every other stock has less bearish short positioning than SOC right now.
The borrow market backs up that picture. Availability has collapsed to just 0.64%, meaning fewer than one share remains available for every 155 already lent out. That figure has been in sub-1% territory for most of September, a sustained tightness that goes well beyond a one-day anomaly. Cost to borrow has risen 54% over the past week to 1.89%, though it remains below levels seen earlier in August when it briefly exceeded 2.4%. The days-to-cover figure from FINRA's most recent official data stands at 6.64, meaning at recent trading volumes it would take over six days for shorts to fully exit. With availability this tight, any sharp reversal in sentiment finds very few shares available to cover into.
Options traders are telling a different story. The put/call ratio has dropped to 0.25, the lowest level of the past year and nearly 1.7 standard deviations below its 20-day average of 0.29. Far from hedging into the drawdown, options positioning is skewed heavily toward calls. That is a striking contrast: short sellers are piling in while options buyers are positioning for a bounce. The two camps are directly opposed, and one of them will be wrong.
The analyst community has not abandoned the stock, but targets have been cut repeatedly as the price has fallen. Roth Capital trimmed its target to $10 from $11 on Tuesday, keeping a Buy rating, while Jefferies cut from $24 to $11 back in early July, also maintaining Buy. The mean price target across covering analysts is $9.50, against a current price of $3.40, implying the Street as a whole still sees significant recovery potential. However, the pattern of relentless downward target revisions, from $47 at Benchmark in late 2025 to targets in single digits today, tells the story of a company that has consistently disappointed. Benchmark itself downgraded to Hold in March. The EV/EBITDA multiple of 2.7x has compressed 0.21 turns over the past 30 days, a modest move given the scale of the price decline. EPS momentum ranks in the bottom 3% of the universe on a 30-day basis, confirming the fundamental backdrop is not providing support.
The bear case rests on three pillars: concentrated asset exposure to the Santa Ynez Unit, legal and regulatory risks around operational resumption, and debt refinancing pressure. The bull case points to a substantially improved liquidity position following the $257 million equity raise, which was intended to support the transition to initial cash flow from Santa Ynez and provide runway ahead of debt obligations. The next earnings event is scheduled for November 13, 44 days from now. The history of earnings reactions at SOC is severe: the two most recent prints produced one-day moves of minus 13.3% and minus 13.9%, with five-day follow-through of minus 21.6% in the most recent instance.
Wikipedia traffic for SOC spiked to a z-score of 2.15 through September 27, the highest retail attention reading in the available window. That kind of attention spike often accompanies sharp price moves rather than preceding them. With retail attention elevated, short interest at record highs, options buyers positioned for a rebound, and a $9.50 analyst target sitting nearly 180% above the current price, the question heading into November is whether any near-term operational update from Santa Ynez shifts the balance between the two very different camps currently positioned in this stock.
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