Stories are generated from ORTEX data and reviewed by the ORTEX team. How we publish
SoundHound AI has now lost 22% in a month and 15% in a single week, closing at $4.88, with November 5 earnings three weeks out and the short side showing no sign of fatigue.
The positioning story has been covered in these pages twice in the past ten days, and the core facts have not changed materially. Short interest nudged up slightly this week to 41.9% of the free float, around 162 million shares, after a brief mid-week dip. Availability remains at 0%: every share in the lending pool is out on loan, a reading that has held almost without interruption since late August and is at the tightest point of the past 52 weeks. The one thing that has shifted since the October 5 note is cost to borrow, which has continued to ease, now at 2.54%, down another 14% on the week and roughly a third of the 7% peak seen in early September. That divergence remains the key diagnostic: the borrow market is completely full, but shorts are no longer paying a premium to hold the position. ORTEX's short score is 76.3, placing SOUN in the 3rd percentile on short score rank, a reading that has been essentially flat for the past two weeks and signals bearish pressure more intense than on 97% of names in the universe. Days to cover from the most recent FINRA settlement data stood at 9.67.
Options traders are not adding much drama. The put/call ratio has actually eased to 0.315, fractionally below its 20-day average of 0.332 and approaching the lower end of the past year's range, with the 52-week low at 0.293. That is a mild signal: far from the 0.668 peak seen at the most defensive point of the past year, and a slight negative z-score of -0.89 relative to recent history. Demand for downside protection is not accelerating, even as the stock slides. The combination of a locked borrow market and a relaxed options skew suggests that existing shorts are sitting tight rather than new participants piling in.
The Street has been a steady source of downward target revisions. Piper Sandler cut its target from $7 to $6 on September 22, maintaining a Neutral rating. DA Davidson trimmed from $12 to $10 in August while keeping its Buy. The mean analyst target across coverage is $12.57, more than 150% above the current price, but that gap reflects how far the stock has fallen rather than fresh conviction. The bull case rests on the LivePerson acquisition adding scale into Fortune 500 customers, OASYS-driven deal momentum, and management's $350 million to $400 million FY27 revenue guide. The bear case is structural: more than 30% of revenue from a single customer, non-recurring revenue making up a meaningful slice of sales, and no path to GAAP profitability in sight. Factor scores add colour: EPS surprise ranks in the 87th percentile, a genuine positive, but short score rank is in the 3rd percentile and days-to-cover rank sits at 9th, placing SOUN firmly in the bearish tail of the universe on positioning metrics.
On the insider side, the most recent open-market activity was one-directional. On September 15, the CEO sold 137,290 shares at $6.33, the COO sold 71,113 shares at the same price, and the Chief Product Officer sold 38,730 shares. None of these sales were disclosed under a 10b5-1 plan, which makes them discretionary rather than pre-arranged. The net insider position over 90 days is negative: roughly 289,000 shares sold on a net basis, worth approximately $1.8 million. BlackRock remains the largest disclosed institutional holder at 7.65% of shares as of September 30, having added 1.6 million shares in its most recent reported period. Mirae Asset added the most aggressively in percentage terms, increasing its position by 2.1 million shares to 2.76 million. Vanguard's 13G/A filed in March showed its main fund reducing to effectively zero, with the stake now split across two separately filing Vanguard entities that together hold roughly 10.5% of shares.
The last two earnings prints both produced double-digit moves to the upside: the August 2026 result saw the stock gain nearly 25% on the day and hold most of that over the following week. That history cuts both ways heading into November 5. A stock with 42% short interest, zero borrow availability, and nearly ten days to cover carries considerable mechanical upside if results surprise positively. The question for the next three weeks is whether the cost-to-borrow softness signals that shorts are comfortable holding through the print or simply that the borrow pool is so locked that no further activity is possible in either direction.
See the live data behind this article on ORTEX.
Open SOUN 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.
