PCG earnings day: cost to borrow triples as call buyers dominate

PG&E Corporation reports Q3 results today, and the data around the stock has shifted sharply since yesterday's close. The cost to borrow jumped to 0.49%, up 202% over the past week, reversing a collapse to 0.14% on Monday. That move, arriving on the morning of the print, is the single most actionable change in today's snapshot.

Borrow cost spikes on earnings morning

Yesterday's trader note flagged that the borrow market looked structurally loose, with availability at 8,559% and the cost to borrow having fallen to its weekly low. That picture has now reversed. The cost to borrow sits at 0.49% as of this morning, back near the levels seen on October 19. Availability remains extremely wide at 8,081%, so this is not a supply-driven move. With roughly 2.2 billion shares available to lend against a short position of just 31.7 million, the lending pool is not under strain. The CTB spike is better read as elevated demand for short-dated borrows around a binary event, not a structural tightening.

Short interest itself moved up 8.8% over the past week to 1.44% of free float. That is still low by any measure, and down sharply from the 40-plus million shares seen in late September. The directional change over the past week is a break from the month-long decline, but the absolute level gives shorts no particular edge.

Call skew holds at a 52-week extreme

The put-call ratio of 0.118 is near the 52-week low of 0.114. It has barely moved from the extreme reached earlier this week. For context, the 52-week high was 0.67. Options traders continue to hold a heavily call-skewed book into the print. The PCR is 1.6 standard deviations below the 20-day mean.

That call positioning sits alongside retail attention running at 3.81 standard deviations above its 90-day average, per Wikipedia views and ORTEX stock page data. The stock has attracted significantly more retail eyeballs than at any point in the past three months, a reading that reflects attention, not a directional signal.

Analyst targets cluster well above spot

Morgan Stanley raised its price target to $21 yesterday, maintaining Equal-Weight. The mean consensus sits at $18.56, against a close of $13.15. That 41% gap has persisted through a period of broad target cuts: Barclays and JP Morgan both lowered to $17 in mid-October, and UBS downgraded to Neutral with a $14 target in late September. The bull-bear spread is unusually wide for a utility.

EPA Clean Air Markets data shows PG&E's gross capacity factor by operator at 5.12% in June 2026, the lowest reading since the series began in 2024 and the smallest June on record.

What to watch

• Q3 earnings are due today at 13:30 UTC. Prior prints produced a 1-day move of minus 1.4% and a 5-day move of minus 1.8%.
• The cost to borrow level and its direction after the print will signal whether short demand was pre-event hedging or something more persistent.
• The PCR is at a 52-week extreme. Watch whether it normalises quickly post-print or holds, which would indicate ongoing positioning rather than event-driven call buying.