Stories are generated from ORTEX data and reviewed by the ORTEX team. How we publish
The most striking development in IQMX this week is not the stock's modest recovery but a sudden and dramatic tightening in the lending market, one that accompanied a sharp repricing of short-seller conviction.
The borrow story is the heart of this note. Availability collapsed from roughly 1,762% to 66.5% between September 30 and October 1, meaning the pool of shares available to borrow shrank from vast surplus to genuinely constrained in a single session. That is the tightest the lending market has been in the 52-week window captured in the data, and availability has held at that level every day since. The shift coincided with a jump in the ORTEX short score from around 33 to 49.5, where it has sat all week. A short score near 50 out of 100 is not extreme on its own, but the pace of the move matters: it covered 16 points in one session. Cost to borrow data is stale (last reading September 23 at 7.4%), but the direction of the borrow rate through August and September was already climbing, from 5.2% in mid-July to above 8% in mid-September before edging back. The combination of tighter availability and an elevated short score points to a market where demand to short the stock has grown meaningfully relative to the lending supply.
The valuation picture is difficult to interpret cleanly. IQMX is a pre-profit quantum computing hardware company: the PE and EV/EBITDA multiples are both negative, reflecting operating losses rather than a conventional earnings base. The price-to-book multiple of 7.3x has risen about 0.24 points over the past month, which at least tells you the market is paying a slightly higher premium to net assets than it was. Enterprise value is reported at roughly EUR 1.38 billion. There is no analyst consensus data available in the current snapshot, and a prior note referenced a 24% upside target, though that note dates from late September and no underlying price target detail is present here. Treat any specific target figure with caution until confirmed by fresh analyst data.
The ownership register is notable for a small, concentrated investor base. Finnish Industry Investment holds 12.6% of shares. MIG Capital sits at 7.5%. The European Innovation Council Fund holds 6.6%. These three alone account for more than a quarter of the company. All changes shown are from August 3, reflecting the IPO-era initial disclosures rather than subsequent trading. Co-founders Jan Goetz and Sierk Poetting remain on the register at 3.0% and 2.0% respectively. The most recent insider activity on record is a July 9 board grant, which is unpriced compensation. The only open-market trades in the data were a series of sells in early July by a senior manager, Juha Hassel, who disposed of roughly 143,000 shares at prices between EUR 16.30 and EUR 17.98. The stock now trades at EUR 9.39, well below those sale prices, down about 45% from where Hassel was selling.
The stock gained 3.1% on the week despite a 2.3% drop on the final day, leaving it up just 0.5% over the past month. The next earnings event is scheduled for November 4. The last reported print, in August, saw the stock fall 5.9% on the day and 6.8% over the following five sessions. With availability now at its tightest recorded level and short conviction rising, the setup heading into that November release is worth monitoring: the key question is whether the borrow market continues to tighten further or whether new shares become available and relieve the pressure before the print.
See the live data behind this article on ORTEX.
Open IQMX 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.
