Intuitive Machines heads into the final days of September with shorts firmly entrenched, the stock down 10% on the week, and the options market leaning bullishly into what looks like a deteriorating price trend.
Short interest is the central fact here. Bears control 30.4% of the free float, a level that has climbed roughly 8 percentage points over the past month and now sits near the top of the range. FINRA's fortnightly official count corroborates the estimate at 36.3 million shares, with 6.25 days to cover. The ORTEX short score of 70.9 ranks LUNR in the 4th percentile for short score among peers, meaning the stock is more heavily shorted than 96% of comparable names. That is not a marginal short book: it is a structural bear case that has been building through September.
The borrow market is less aggressive than those figures might suggest. Availability has loosened materially this week, rising to 72% from roughly 38% just a few days ago. That is still far below the 52-week high of 100%, but the directional move is notable: more shares are available to borrow now than at any point since mid-September, suggesting short sellers are not scrambling to cover and lenders are not yet under pressure. Cost to borrow has crept higher, up 12% on the week to just under 1%, but remains low in absolute terms. The lending market looks congested rather than seized.
Options positioning is the sharpest divergence in the setup. The put/call ratio fell to 0.33 on Tuesday, close to its 52-week low of 0.16 and well below the 20-day average of 0.35. That means call volume is heavily dominant relative to recent history. With the stock falling 10% and shorts at 30% of the float, heavy call buying reads as a bet on a sharp reversal rather than as broad optimism about the business. On Monday, the PCR briefly spiked to 0.62, the only notably defensive print of the past month, before collapsing again on Tuesday. The two-day whipsaw captures the tension: the options market is not settled on direction.
Street opinion is split but skews bullish, at odds with where the stock is trading. Most of the recent analyst moves came in mid-August, following the last earnings print, when several firms trimmed targets while holding Buy ratings: Canaccord cut from $41 to $39, B. Riley from $45 to $43, and Cantor Fitzgerald took a larger slice out, dropping from $43 to $32 while keeping Overweight. Stifel went the other way, upgrading to Buy from Hold even as it cut its target to $26. B of A Securities, the lone bear on the panel, lifted its Underperform target from $11 to $13 at end of August. With the stock at $14.55, B of A's bear case is essentially in the price. The consensus mean target is $29.50, implying roughly 100% upside from current levels, but that figure carries the weight of several months-old targets and should be read as directional rather than precise. The EV/EBITDA multiple has compressed by around 11 points over the past 30 days, reflecting the price decline.
The ownership register has a few threads worth tracking. Kamal Ghaffarian, founder and director with a 19.7% stake, is on the 13D register as an activist filer, a designation that has not changed across six filings since December 2024. His stake is as last disclosed and positions below 5% may exit without a further filing, but at 19.7% his alignment with the stock is hard to miss. On the insider trading side, CTO Timothy Crain executed a series of option exercises and same-day sales under a 10b5-1 plan in mid and late September, totalling roughly $2.15 million in proceeds. Pre-arranged plans reduce the signalling value of such transactions, but the pattern is worth noting in the context of the 90-day insider net of negative $163 million in value, a figure dominated by Advent International's full exit of its 6.6% position.
The next earnings date is 13 November, 44 days away. The last two prints produced one-day moves of 12% and 5.7% respectively, both to the upside, which gives the heavy short book something concrete to price around between now and then.
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