FSLR reports Q1 results after the close today — April 30 — and the most striking feature of the setup isn't the guidance anxiety or the analyst target cuts. It's the speed at which short sellers have been covering.
Short interest has dropped sharply over the past six weeks. At the peak in mid-March, shorts held roughly 7.9% of the free float. That figure has fallen to 6.4% — an 18% decline over the past month, with the bulk of the covering happening in a single decisive step: between April 22 and April 24, short interest dropped from 7.2% to 6.5% in two sessions. The direction is unambiguous. Bears are reducing exposure into the print, not adding to it. Days to cover still runs at 3.6, so the unwind has been steady rather than a panicked squeeze — but the trend is real.
The borrow market reinforces the picture of loosening pressure. Availability remains ample, with the lending pool far from exhausted — borrow cost runs at just 0.44% annualised, near the bottom of its six-week range despite a 16% uptick on the week. Availability of shares to borrow has not been a constraint at any point in recent months, consistent with a 52-week utilisation peak of 27%. Options traders are similarly relaxed. The put/call ratio of 0.65 is slightly below its 20-day average of 0.66 and sits more than half a standard deviation through the bearish side. For a stock reporting earnings today, that is a notably calm options surface — well below the 52-week high PCR of 1.02. Taken together, the positioning picture reads as cautious but not alarmed.
The Street's direction of travel has been one-way for the past two months: targets down, ratings held. Citigroup and Barclays both trimmed their price objectives in the week of April 21 — Citi to $243, Barclays to $213 — while keeping their positive ratings intact. Morgan Stanley, Wells Fargo, Susquehanna, and Evercore all made similar moves through March and early April, cutting targets by 10–20% but stopping short of downgrades. The lone downgrade in the cycle was GLJ Research in early March, moving to Hold from Buy. That leaves 11 buy-equivalent ratings in the consensus against a mean target around $230, roughly 20% above the current $190.61 close. Whether those targets are realistic depends heavily on today's guidance. Bulls point to First Solar's position as the dominant US-made thin-film manufacturer and the implied pricing uplift from tightening cadmium telluride supply, with revenue estimates pencilled at around $6.3bn for 2026. Bears counter that guidance cuts are a real risk — some investors assign roughly a one-in-three probability — on the back of module underperformance and backlog thinning beyond 2026.
On valuation, the stock trades at 9.5x trailing earnings and 6.5x EV/EBITDA — both multiples are essentially flat over the past week but have contracted modestly over 30 days as the share price drifted. The P/E of 9.5x is, by conventional measures, not expensive for a manufacturer with positive earnings. ORTEX factor scores flag the EV/EBIT rank at the 96th percentile of the universe — reflecting how cheaply the stock prices its operating earnings relative to enterprise value — while EPS momentum over 90 days ranks in just the 12th percentile, underscoring the weight of the estimate-revision cycle working against the name.
Earnings history has not been kind. In February, First Solar fell 13% the day after its prior Q4 release and extended that to an 18% five-day decline. The print before that also delivered a 17% one-day drop. For context, the most recent event — April 28 — recorded a 3.5% decline, though the data appears to reflect early pre-market reaction rather than a full session move. Two consecutive double-digit falls have conditioned options traders and short sellers alike, which may help explain why short interest was so elevated through March before the covering began. The question after the close is whether Q1 guidance confirms the bear case or provides the kind of upward surprise that would pressure the remaining 6.4% short base.
The note to watch after the print: does guidance language shift meaningfully on domestic module pricing and 2026 backlog coverage, and does that move the cluster of sell-side targets that have been tracking lower in near-lockstep for eight weeks?
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