ONDS Heads Into Earnings With 69% Short Interest and a Locked Borrow Market

Ondas Inc. enters its November 12 earnings date with short interest at 69% of the free float, borrow availability at zero, and the stock down 13% on the week: a configuration that has grown more extreme with each passing session.

Since the previous notes published on October 27 and October 28, short interest has climbed further still. It was 68.6% of float at the end of last week. It is 69.1% now, with 254.5 million shares short as of November 3. That is a fresh record against the current share count. The month-on-month increase is 7.1%, and the direction has been almost entirely one way since early September, when the position was closer to 43% of float. FINRA's most recent fortnightly official figure corroborates the picture: 253.9 million shares short, days-to-cover of 4.57. The ORTEX short score has ticked up to 73.75, in the 2nd percentile of all stocks tracked, meaning almost everything else in the universe carries less short-side conviction. Days-to-cover ranks in the 10th percentile, and availability in the 3rd.

The borrow market remains completely locked. Availability has been at 0% for every session in the dataset, running back through mid-September at minimum. Every share in the lending pool is lent out. New shorts cannot enter without sourcing inventory that does not exist in the standard market. Borrow cost has drifted down from a September peak above 5% and runs near 4.18%, roughly flat on the week. The low cost is not a sign of comfort: it reflects that the existing position is already in place and not churning, not that shorts are retreating. Options positioning offers a mild counterpoint. The put/call ratio is 0.44, almost 1.8 standard deviations below its 20-day average of 0.47, sitting closer to its 52-week low of 0.20 than its high of 0.54. Options traders are, at the margin, leaning more bullish than usual, the one signal that diverges from the dominant short-side story.

The Street is firmly in the bull camp, though the gap between targets and price has widened sharply as the stock has fallen. The consensus is "buy" with a mean price target of $18.88, against a close of $5.79, implying more than 220% upside. That target reflects analyst views as of early October: Citizens initiated at Market Outperform with a $14 target on October 5, the most recent action. Needham has held at Buy with a $19 target. Ladenburg Thalmann raised to $22.75 in August. The bull case rests on a $115 billion to $201 billion addressable market in autonomous systems, a $757 million pro forma backlog as of June 30, and revenue modeled to grow from $51 million in FY25 to nearly $1.5 billion in FY28. The bear case is blunt: 17 acquisitions in 12 months create integration risk, a share count that has grown more than six-fold since early FY25 means ongoing dilution, two customers accounted for roughly 55% and 11% of FY25 revenue, and roughly 45% of revenue comes from Israel, where operational risk remains elevated. The EPS momentum score ranks in the 3rd percentile over 30 days, and forward earnings yield ranks in the 16th percentile.

One activist entry is worth noting. Joseph V. Popolo filed a Schedule 13D in January 2025 and amended it in June 2025, disclosing a stake that had fallen from 8.32% to 4.95% of shares outstanding. A 13D signals activist intent, and the reduction below 5% is significant: under SEC rules, holders who drop below the 5% threshold are not required to file again, so Popolo's current position is unknown. BlackRock reported a 7.2% stake in July 2026, since updated to 6.9% as of September 30 with a substantial increase of 30 million shares in the quarter. State Street and Geode both added meaningfully in the same period. Vanguard filed a 13G/A in March 2026 disclosing it had reduced its stake to zero, an exit worth flagging given its prior 5.09% position. Retail attention has dropped sharply: the ORTEX Wikipedia/pageview signal shows a z-score of negative 2.4, the lowest in recent history, suggesting that whatever drove retail interest earlier in the year has faded.

Earnings arrive on November 12. The last quarterly print, in August, saw the stock fall 5.4% on the day and 14.2% over the following five days. The print before that produced a 1% gain on the day followed by a 2.2% decline over five sessions. With short interest at 69% of float, a borrow market that cannot accommodate new entrants, and a stock already down 20% over the past month, the asymmetry around the number is unusually wide: the question is whether the report delivers enough on backlog conversion and revenue trajectory to force any part of that short position to cover against a lending market with nowhere to go.