EV Bears, Credit Stress, and Apple Lead Into Halloween Close

EV Sector Under Pressure

Short sellers are piling into electric vehicle names as October ends. Wolfspeed leads the pack with short interest at 88.6% of free float, up 4.8 percentage points in a week. Available shares to borrow have hit zero. Lucid Group sits at 65.1% SI % FF with a cost to borrow near 16%. Polestar carries a 182% cost to borrow. ORTEX Alt Data shows Dutch car registrations, a leading indicator for Polestar revenue, are running 37% below the same quarter last year with all three months in. That real-economy weakness is giving bears more confidence.

Across the US market, new EV registrations dropped 29% year on year in August. The stock of non-plug hybrids fell to 14,476 units, the lowest reading since the ORTEX series began in 2015.

Auto Credit and Banks

Carvana is drawing attention from both short sellers and options traders. ORTEX Alt Data shows delinquencies in its ABS trusts at 4.6 standard deviations above their own history as of 15 October, the largest outlier in the consumer credit dataset. Banco Santander ABS trust delinquencies are running 3.3 standard deviations above history over the same period.

On the other side of financials, JP Morgan lifted target prices on WFC, USB, TFC, RF, PNC, STT and NTRS in a single sweep, tracking better-than-expected Q3 results across US banks.

Earnings Week Ahead

AAPL reports Monday after the close. The stock carries a market cap above $5 trillion. RACE posts numbers on 3 November. ORTEX Austrian car registrations, a leading indicator for Ferrari revenue, are running 75% below the same quarter last year. That is the weakest alt data signal in the dataset. HMC reports 6 November. Japanese car registrations lead Honda revenue by 65 days and are running 10% below last year.

Index Radar

Today is the Russell 2000 December review rank date. LTH and UMBF jumped to 90% deletion odds overnight, carrying $901M and $1.3B of forced selling respectively. ORTEX Index Rebalance Radar forecasts MRNA at 88% probability of joining the MSCI World, with $5.9B of buying attached.