Shorts, Squeezes and a Busy Earnings Week

US: CoreWeave Falls, QBTS Squeeze Builds

CoreWeave hit a new all-time low on Monday. The AI cloud provider counts Alphabet and Microsoft among its largest customers, making the slide a wider signal on AI infrastructure spending appetite. Separately, D-Wave Quantum is close to a short squeeze before its November 5 earnings. Short utilisation has hit 100% and available shares to borrow have collapsed to just 0.38% of short interest. New short positions are now nearly impossible to open. Newell Brands drew the opposite attention. Its put/call ratio crashed to 0.24, nearly four standard deviations below its 20-day average, pointing to aggressive call buying ahead of imminent earnings.

Children's Place is reportedly weighing liquidation as a bankruptcy option, according to Bloomberg. That is a step beyond restructuring and would end the retail chain entirely.

Analyst Moves

Evercore ISI cut Reddit from Buy to Hold and slashed its target from $265 to $120. Reddit already carries 15% short interest as a percentage of free float, so the downgrade arrives on crowded ground. On the other side, Guggenheim raised targets on AbbVie and Regeneron, and Wells Fargo lifted its Lockheed Martin target by $100 to $700.

Europe and Index Radar

CVC Capital Partners' cash tender for Italian pharma firm Recordati opens today, with a 93% completion probability before November 20. Completion would force an estimated $219M of FTSE MIB tracker selling within days. Across the MSCI World November review, Flutter Entertainment and Textron each carry deletion probabilities above 70%, with $741M and $1B of potential forced selling respectively. The announcement is due November 11.

Auto Earnings: Weak Signals Ahead

Registration data from ORTEX's alt data ingestion paints a cautious picture for this week's auto earnings cluster. Austrian car registrations, which lead Ferrari's revenue by 22 days, are running 75% below the same quarter last year. Japanese registrations, a strong-fit leading indicator for Honda, are down 10% year-on-year. India's two-wheeler registrations fell to 407,743 in October, the lowest October count since 2017, a direct headwind for Mahindra and Mahindra reporting November 5.