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SoundHound AI has shed another 15% over the past week to $4.88, extending a month-long slide that has now taken the stock 22% lower, with bears firmly in control and November 5 earnings just three weeks away.
The borrow market tells the same story it has for weeks, but with one fresh development. Availability has dropped to 0% and held there, every share in the lending pool is out on loan, a reading that has barely moved since late August. Short interest has nudged higher this week to 41.9% of the free float, roughly 162 million shares short, after a brief dip earlier in the week that briefly pulled the figure below 42%. What is new is that cost to borrow has fallen further to 2.54%, down 14% on the week and less than half the 5% to 7% range seen in early September. That divergence is worth noting: the borrow market is fully used, but shorts are no longer paying up to get in, suggesting the position is being maintained rather than aggressively built. ORTEX's short score for SOUN is 76.3, placing it in the 3rd percentile on short score rank, meaning bearish signals here are more intense than on 97% of the names in the universe. Days to cover from the most recent FINRA data run to 9.7 days.
Options traders are leaning in the opposite direction. The put/call ratio has slipped to 0.315, below its 20-day average of 0.332 and close to its 52-week low of 0.293. That makes options positioning one of the few mildly constructive data points on the stock: call flow is relatively dominant even as the share price falls, though the move is not statistically dramatic at less than one standard deviation below the mean.
The Street remains split, and analyst targets have been on a sustained downward march. Piper Sandler trimmed its target to $6 in late September while holding a Neutral rating. DA Davidson has maintained a Buy with a $10 target after cutting it from $12 following August earnings. The bull case centres on OASYS momentum, the LivePerson acquisition adding enterprise scale, and management's confidence in $350M to $400M of 2027 revenue. The bear case is harder to dismiss at current levels: more than 30% of revenue comes from one customer, non-recurring license and royalty sales create lumpiness, and GAAP operating profitability remains well out of reach. The mean analyst target of $12.57 stands more than 150% above the current price, a gap that reflects sustained target cuts without matching price-target resets to where the stock actually trades.
The insider register adds a cautionary note. The CEO, COO, CFO and Chief Product Officer all sold shares in September, with the CEO selling roughly 137,000 shares at $6.33. None of those sales were made under a pre-arranged 10b5-1 plan, making them discretionary transactions rather than scheduled liquidations. Net insider selling over the past 90 days runs to approximately 289,000 shares with a disclosed value near $1.8 million. The CFO received a stock grant of just over 1 million shares on September 4, a compensation event rather than an open-market purchase, so it carries no directional signal on its own.
Wikipedia attention for SOUN has fallen sharply against its own 90-day history, with the z-score for retail engagement sitting at negative 2.6, well below the norm. Peer stocks have fared better over the same period: PLTR gained 8.6% on the week and C3.ai added 6.9%, while CRNC rose 10.2%. SOUN's 15% weekly loss stands in clear contrast to the broader small-cap AI cohort, which found buyers this week even as SoundHound continued to slide.
With earnings on November 5, the central question heading into the print is whether revenue growth and any update on the LivePerson integration can outweigh concerns about customer concentration and the path to operating profitability, in a stock where bears hold nearly 42% of the float and have nowhere left to borrow.
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