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PSNY enters the final stretch before its November 5 earnings with a stock down 39% over the past month, a borrow market that has become dramatically more expensive, and its own registration data pointing sharply lower in key European markets.
The lending picture tells the most urgent story this week. Borrowing costs have tripled over the past month, with cost to borrow now running at 46.5%, up from roughly 15% at the start of September. Availability has tightened considerably too, with only about 15% of borrowed shares still available to lend, compared with nearly 39% in early September. Earlier this week, availability briefly touched 7.7%, close to fully exhausted. The 52-week minimum availability reached zero at some point this year, a reminder of how tight this borrow has been before. Short interest itself has been relatively stable, adding around 8.5% over the past month to sit near 2.57 million shares, but the cost of maintaining those positions has risen sharply. The ORTEX short score of 77.4 places Polestar in the most-pressured tier of the universe.
Options positioning is moderately defensive but not extreme. The put/call ratio came in at 1.32 on Wednesday, a touch above its 20-day average of 1.22, with a z-score of just 0.37. That is nowhere near the 4.39 high this instrument has seen over the past year. The relative mildness of options skew compared with the aggression in the borrow market is a notable divergence: it suggests the pressure is coming from short sellers managing an expensive position rather than a broad wave of hedging from long holders.
The Street offers little comfort for bulls. Cantor Fitzgerald reiterated its Underweight rating on September 4. Barclays also carries Underweight, though it raised its target to $15 in January, a figure that now looks ambitious given the stock trades at $5.58. The bear case is stark: gross margins of approximately -97% in Q2 2025, far below earlier projections of around 6%, and downward revisions to both revenue and average selling price targets for 2025 and 2026. The EPS surprise factor score of 90 reflects that the company has repeatedly shocked analysts, though not in a positive direction recently. Financial distress signals are elevated, with the f-score at 3 and a deeply negative return on assets flagged in ORTEX's own scoring model.
Polestar's European registration data, measured by ORTEX Alt Data across four markets that have each been shown to lead its quarterly revenue, is running in the wrong direction for Q3. Dutch registrations, which have one of the strongest fits against revenue (R-squared of 0.94, a 100% hit rate over 21 quarters) and lead by 60 days, totalled 369 vehicles for the quarter with all three months now complete, down 56% against the same quarter last year and down 22% from the prior quarter. Finnish registrations came in 11% below the prior quarter with two of three months in. Austrian registrations are down 24% from the prior quarter with two months reported. German registrations showed a sequential rebound of 69% with two months in, though the year-on-year comparison is not yet available. The Dutch data, given its strong historical fit, is the single most informative reading of the group. Washington state recorded its largest August for battery-electric registrations on record (since 2021), though US volumes are small relative to Polestar's European base.
On ownership, the register is dominated by related parties. Eric Li, who holds a 13D activist filing on the stock, is disclosed at 60.5% as of his most recent amendment on September 8. Zhejiang Geely Holding and Shu Fu Li together account for roughly 60% more of the disclosed shareholder base. A cluster of board directors bought small amounts of stock in late June and early July at prices between $17 and $21, meaningfully above the current $5.58. Those purchases have not been followed by further disclosed buying, and the gap between those transaction prices and today's level underlines how quickly the stock has deteriorated.
With earnings confirmed for November 5, the next 28 days bring the question of whether the Q3 delivery count, when released, changes the calculus for a market already deeply sceptical. The Dutch registration series, now complete for the quarter, will be the data point to set against whatever Polestar reports.
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