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Nebius Group heads into the week with a striking split: the stock is up 7.4% on Tuesday alone and 5.3% on the week to $249.87, yet the COO sold roughly $90 million of stock on Monday and the short base has not moved.
The insider selling is the week's defining data point. COO Nave Ophir filed ten separate open-market sales on October 5, totalling around 403,000 shares at prices between $231 and $244, for combined proceeds of approximately $90 million. Every transaction was executed under a pre-arranged 10b5-1 plan, which means the sales were scheduled in advance rather than being a discretionary call on the stock's direction. Planned sales carry less signal than unplanned ones, but the scale is hard to ignore: net insider disposals over the trailing 90 days now stand at nearly 673,000 shares, worth around $159 million. No insider buying has appeared in the same window to offset that.
Short positioning tells a stubbornly unchanged story, despite the price move. At 46.9 million shares, short interest as a percentage of free float is 21.5%, up a fraction from last week's 21.2% and essentially where it has been since early September, when a large block of covering pulled the position down from the August peak of around 53 million shares. Since then the position has plateaued. Borrow conditions have loosened materially: availability has risen to 74.4%, up from 47% a week ago and the most comfortable it has been since mid-September, while cost to borrow has fallen 19% on the week to 0.56%, the lowest of the past 30 days. With borrow this cheap and supply this plentiful, the short base faces no mechanical pressure to cover. The ORTEX short score has held in an almost featureless 68 to 68.7 range for the entire month, a level that ranks in the 6th percentile of the universe (meaning more heavily shorted than 94% of peers), yet there is no sign of the score accelerating in either direction. Options are equally inert: the put/call ratio of 0.89 is almost exactly its 20-day average of 0.89, with a z-score near zero.
The Street is sharply divided, and that division has widened this week. William Blair initiated with an Outperform on September 30, adding to the bullish camp that already includes Truist (Buy, $355 target) and Baird (Outperform, $340). The most aggressive recent move came from BNP Paribas on September 24, which upgraded to Outperform and lifted its target from $260 to $399, a level 60% above the current price. Against that, Rothschild initiated with a Sell and a $84 target on September 21, implying two-thirds downside. The mean analyst target of $283 sits only 13% above the current price, suppressed by the bearish outlier and by DA Davidson's stubborn Neutral at $250. The bull case rests on Nebius's Q2 revenue of $582 million, 454% year-on-year growth, a $3 billion annualised run rate, 41% adjusted EBITDA margins, and a committed backlog the company says exceeds $40 billion. The bear case is equally concrete: guided capex of $20 billion to $25 billion this year against $3.0 billion to $3.4 billion of revenue, persistent adjusted operating losses, and a backlog that may be more than 80% concentrated in Microsoft and Meta. EPS momentum factor scores are exceptional at the 94th and 99th percentiles over 30 and 90 days respectively, and the analyst recommendation differential ranks in the 98th percentile, but the earnings yield is negative and the PE ratio is deeply in the red, reflecting a company that is still years from normalised profitability.
The ownership register adds a further layer of interest. NVIDIA filed a Schedule 13G in July disclosing a 9.3% stake of around 22.3 million shares, a strategic position from the dominant GPU supplier that underpins the bull case on procurement access. Goldman Sachs holds 10.5% as last disclosed in August, up from 7.2% previously. Arkady Volozh, the founder, remained at 10.7% as of October 1 with a small recent reduction of 83,000 shares. Orbis Investment Management has fallen below 5% from a prior disclosed 5.9%, and under 13D/G rules may not file again unless it crosses the threshold. These stakes are as last disclosed and positions can change without further filing until the 5% threshold is crossed again.
November 12 is the next scheduled earnings date, 36 days away. The setup heading into that print is one of persistent short interest, loosening borrow, a COO reducing exposure under a pre-planned programme, and a Street whose targets span from $84 to $399. Whether the August pattern, a 32% single-day gain on the last earnings release, conditions expectations this time around is the question worth watching.
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