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SoundHound AI enters October with the same basic tension that defined September: short interest locked near 43% of the free float, borrow availability at zero, and a stock that has now shed 15% over the past month to $5.84, with the next earnings date five weeks away on November 5.
The positioning picture has changed only at the margins since the note published five days ago. Short interest edged up another 0.4% on the week to 42.7% of the free float, with 165.4 million shares short and days to cover near seven. Availability remains at 0%, a reading that has held almost without interruption since late August, meaning the entire lending pool is currently out on loan. What has shifted is cost to borrow, which has fallen further to 2.80%, down 21% on the week and roughly half the level seen in early September when it briefly touched 7%. The picture is the same one from last week: a borrow market that is fully used but no longer being raided for new shorts at a premium. ORTEX's short score for SOUN is 76.3, placing it in the 2nd percentile on short score rank, meaning bearish signals here remain more intense than on 98% of the stocks in the universe.
Options traders are not adding to the bearish case. The put/call ratio is 0.33, slightly below its 20-day average of 0.34 and near the lower end of its 52-week range. That is a notably call-heavy skew for a stock with this level of short interest. It suggests the options market sees potential upside, or at minimum is not hedging for a collapse, even as the short book sits at multi-year highs.
The Street is split in a way that maps neatly onto the fundamental debate. Bulls, led by DA Davidson (Buy, $10 target) and HC Wainwright (Buy, $20 target), point to the LivePerson acquisition as a scale play: roughly $250 million enterprise value, at least $100 million of expected 2027 revenue, and a balance sheet that should remain debt-free at closing. Revenue hit $61.9 million in the most recent quarter, up 45% year on year, and the company reaffirmed full-year 2026 guidance of $245 million and longer-term targets of $350 to $400 million for 2027. Bears focus on quality: GAAP losses persist, one customer accounts for more than 30% of revenue, and a meaningful share of sales is license- and royalty-based, leaving results exposed to auto demand cycles and deal slippage. Piper Sandler, holding a Neutral rating, trimmed its target to $6 on September 22, close to the current price. The consensus mean target is $12.57, more than double where the stock trades, though that gap partly reflects targets set before the recent leg lower and should be read with some caution. On factor scores, EPS surprise ranks at the 87th percentile, a genuine positive, but short score rank (2nd percentile) and days-to-cover rank (12th percentile) show how dominant the bearish positioning signal has become.
Insider activity from mid-September reinforces the cautious read. The CEO, Keyvan Mohajer, sold 137,290 shares at $6.33 on September 15, a discretionary open-market sale not filed under a 10b5-1 plan. The COO, CFO and Chief Product Officer all sold on the same date, adding up to roughly $1.8 million in net insider outflows over the past 90 days. These were open-market disposals, not grant-related mechanics, which gives them more signal weight. BlackRock reported an increase of 1.6 million shares as of September 30, nudging its stake to 7.65% of shares, and Mirae Asset added 2.1 million shares in its most recent filing. No 13D activist is on the register.
Wikipedia attention for SOUN is running well below its own 90-day average, with a z-score of negative 2.6 as of mid-September, suggesting retail interest has cooled sharply from earlier in the year. With no measured leading indicator in the alt-data layer pointing toward the November print, the next real information event is the Q3 earnings release itself on November 5, and what to watch between now and then is whether cost to borrow continues its descent even as short interest holds firm, a continued divergence between those two signals would mark a structurally different lending market than the one that existed in August.
See the live data behind this article on ORTEX.
Open SOUN on ORTEX →ORTEX Market Intelligence content is generated by AI from a snapshot of ORTEX's proprietary data and reviewed by the ORTEX team. Content is informational only and does not constitute investment advice.
