PSQL's Borrow Costs Ease but Short Sellers Return

Pasqal Holding SA heads into the final stretch of October with a contradictory setup: shorts are rebuilding fast, yet the borrow market is loosening and analysts who have just initiated coverage are pitching targets nearly three times the current price.

The lending picture tells the most interesting story this week. Cost to borrow has fallen sharply, dropping from above 320% in mid-September to 182% now, a 30-day decline of 36%. Availability has swung in the opposite direction: from around 170% at the start of the week to 309% by October 22, meaning there are now roughly three shares available to lend for every two already borrowed. That loosening suggests prime brokers have found more stock to lend, rather than that short pressure has meaningfully abated. The 52-week low availability was 89%, so the borrow market is nowhere near stressed on absolute terms, but the combination of falling cost and rising short count is unusual.

Short positioning is moving the other way. Estimated shares short rose 17% over the past week to around 601,000, reversing a month-long decline that had brought the short count down roughly 9% from August levels. With a float-adjusted percentage not readily calculable from the data available, the raw count matters less than the direction: shorts rebuilt positions meaningfully even as borrow costs fell, suggesting conviction rather than opportunism. The FINRA fortnightly figure, with a September 30 settlement date, shows 312,000 shares short at that cutoff, confirming the recent acceleration is a genuine step-up in bearish positioning.

The Street sits firmly in the other camp. Every analyst who has initiated or maintained coverage in the past month has stamped a Buy rating. StoneX opened with a $15.00 target on October 6. Needham followed at $16.00 on September 30. Canaccord Genuity, which initiated at $16.00 on September 22, maintained that target at the end of September. With the stock at $5.56, the mean target of $15.25 implies a return potential of roughly 175%. That gap deserves scrutiny: the stock is down 25% over the past month and down nearly 2% on the week, so the analyst community has not yet moved to close targets toward where shares are actually trading. The bull case rests on Pasqal's neutral-atom architecture, seven deployed quantum processing units, EUR 70.4 million in booked and awarded business, and a EUR 312.9 million cash position that provides runway through the commercialisation curve. The bear case points to 1H26 revenue of just EUR 4.9 million against a EUR 59.2 million operating loss, with slow procurement cycles and material technical risks around two-qubit gate error rates and the analog-to-digital transition.

The ownership register adds another layer of newsworthy detail. Bpifrance Participations, the French state investment arm, filed a Schedule 13D in September disclosing an 11.4% stake of 24.5 million shares. A 13D filing signals active intent, not passive ownership, and given Bpifrance's role as a French industrial policy instrument, its presence on the register at activist level is one of the more significant facts about this stock. Quantonation Ventures SAS holds 11.5% and filed a passive 13G in October. Inflection Point Fund I holds 7.0%, and Temasek Holdings disclosed a 5.6% passive stake on October 16. As always with 13D/G filings, these are point-in-time disclosures around the 5% threshold: positions can change without a further filing once a holder drops below that level.

The next earnings event is pencilled in for December 24. The only prior reaction data available shows a sharp response: the September 24 report produced a 6.4% one-day fall and a 16.2% decline over the following five days, though August's print was broadly flat. With borrow availability loosening even as shorts build, and a wide gap between analyst targets and the current price, the December print becomes the clearest date on which these opposing signals will be tested.