Sandisk's Short Interest Hits a Year Low as Shares Slide

SNDK short sellers have been retreating from the stock at a steady pace, even as the share price has dropped nearly 8% over the past week to close at $1,365.

Short interest now stands at 3.4% of the free float, its lowest level in at least a year. In absolute share terms, roughly 4.9 million shares are short today. That compares with nearly 7.8 million in early September, a reduction of more than 35% in six weeks. The trend held through this week: short interest edged up 2.9% on Tuesday alone, but remains essentially flat on the week overall, down a fraction of a percent from seven days ago. The month-on-month picture tells the real story, a 13% decline in shares short over 30 days, with covering continuing into a falling stock.

The borrow market gives the short side no obvious friction. Availability is running at 4,474%, meaning roughly 45 shares remain available to borrow for every one currently on loan. That is among the loosest conditions seen on SNDK over the past year, well above the 52-week trough of 2,694%. Cost to borrow has fallen sharply too, dropping more than 54% over the past week to just 0.12%, and is down 84% over the past month. Both readings point in the same direction: the lending market is not generating any pressure on existing short positions, and there is ample room for new shorts to enter if sentiment shifts.

Options traders, meanwhile, are sitting slightly below their recent defensive peak. The put/call ratio is at 1.19, just beneath the 20-day average of 1.22 and roughly 0.8 standard deviations below it. That is a modest pullback from the more cautious stance seen through September and early October, when the ratio consistently ran above 1.25. The 52-week range runs from 0.72 to 1.65, so the current reading is towards the defensive end historically, but not at an extreme.

On the Street, the most recent analyst action came from Mizuho, which raised its target on October 6 to $2,050 from $1,875 while keeping an Outperform rating. That followed Rosenblatt's initiation at Buy with a $2,400 target in late September. The mean analyst target across all coverage is $2,173, implying roughly 59% upside from the current price. That gap is large, though it reflects the stock's sharp drop from levels closer to $1,700 to $1,800 in September when several of those targets were set. Bears point to NAND oversupply risk, consumer end-market softness, and the company's exposure to Kioxia joint-venture fixed costs as reasons to doubt the margin framework management has outlined for fiscal years 2028 to 2030. Bulls counter with datacenter revenue growth of 437% in fiscal 2026 and a structural shift in how hyperscalers are treating NAND, treating it less as a commodity and more as a system-level component.

Insider activity over the past 90 days has been one-directional. CEO David Goeckeler sold just over 6,600 shares across several transactions on September 17, all under pre-arranged 10b5-1 plans, generating approximately $8.9 million. The CLO made a smaller 10b5-1 sale of 600 shares on October 1. Net insider activity over the 90-day window is negative $117.6 million across 75,421 net shares sold. All the selling was plan-driven, which limits the signal value, but the scale of the net outflow is worth noting against a backdrop of the stock trading well below where those sales were executed.

The next earnings event is scheduled for October 29. Previous prints have generated wide reactions: the August 2026 quarterly results triggered a one-day move of plus 16.9%, while an earlier August date saw the stock fall 11.8% on the day. With eight days to go, the combination of loosening borrow conditions, low short interest, and an options market that is slightly less defensive than a week ago sets the positioning picture going into that release.