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AST SpaceMobile picked up a Deutsche Bank upgrade to Buy on Monday, with analyst Bryan Kraft maintaining his $93 target. That implies 83% upside from Friday's close of $51. The timing is pointed: the stock has fallen 23% in a month, short sellers hold 23.9% of the free float, and the borrow market remains near its tightest levels all year.
Why this matters: A bullish call from a major bank landing into one of the most crowded short positions on the market creates a direct collision of views. The data points do not obviously agree with each other.
Deutsche Bank's move reverses the bank's own downgrade from May 2026, when Kraft cut to Hold with a $106 target. The stock is now 52% below that prior target. Berenberg initiated at Buy with a $92 target in September. B. Riley went the other direction on October 2, downgrading to Neutral and cutting its target from $85 to $65. The Street is genuinely split.
The mean analyst price target stands at $78.48. At $51, the stock trades at a 35% discount to that consensus. Piper Sandler carries an Overweight at $98. Cantor Fitzgerald holds Overweight at $90. The bull case rests on roughly 45 satellites in orbit by early 2027, government contracts providing near-term revenue, and a $500 million 2027 sales floor with a $1 billion upside scenario. The bear case points to launch supply-chain risk, a conversion loss tied to a Q2 failure, Starlink interference, and ongoing capital dilution risk.
The lending side of the ledger has shifted since the October 7 note. Availability has risen from 4.4% to 9.4%, a meaningful recovery from the near-zero readings of late September and early October. The pool hit 0.31% at its 52-week low, meaning virtually every share was already lent. At 9.4%, roughly nine shares are available for every hundred already borrowed. That is still very tight. The ORTEX short score sits at 74.6, placing ASTS in the 2nd percentile for short score rank across the market.
Short interest edged down 1.1% on the week to 23.9% of the free float, but is still 13% above where it was a month ago. The bears have not stepped back in any meaningful way.
The put-call ratio hit 0.556 on October 9, sitting 2.1 standard deviations above its 20-day mean of 0.50. It has since pulled back to 0.49, near the mean. The spike coincided with a 10.5% single-session drop. Put demand rose as the stock fell, a pattern consistent with defensive hedging ahead of the November 10 earnings date.
ORTEX puts a 60% probability on ASTS being removed from both the CRSP US Large and CRSP US Mid indices at the December 2026 quarterly review. The price that decides it is $53.81. The stock closed at $51 on October 9, already below that line. The same review could bring a share count increase in the CRSP US Small index, with ORTEX forecasting $217 million of buying flow. Rank date is December 4, with any change effective December 23.
See the live data behind this article on ORTEX.
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