Ormat Technologies walks into its Q1 2026 results — scheduled for May 7 — with a quietly charged setup. Short interest has risen steadily all month, options traders have turned more cautious than usual, and the stock is trading a few points below where most of the Street wants to buy it.
Short sellers have been rebuilding positions with unusual consistency. Short Interest % of Free Float has climbed from roughly 5.9% at the start of April to 6.5% now — a gain of about 11% over the month. The pace picked up this week, with the short count rising 6% in five sessions alone. Days to cover, at 9.5, indicate it would take nearly two weeks of average volume to unwind the position — a meaningful cushion for shorts if they need to exit. That said, borrow availability remains loose, and cost to borrow at 0.49% is actually cheaper than a month ago. The ORTEX short score has drifted up to 54.7, a multi-week high, but from a level that hardly signals capitulation pressure. This looks like a measured, deliberate short rebuild rather than a squeeze-prone pile-on.
Options positioning has shifted in the same direction, adding weight to the cautious read. The put/call ratio has climbed to 0.43 — well above its 20-day average of 0.34 and roughly 1.2 standard deviations above the norm. The move happened abruptly around April 23, when the PCR jumped from the 0.29 range it had held for weeks to its current level. That timing lines up with the short-side rebuild, suggesting hedging demand picked up at roughly the same moment both in the derivatives and lending markets. At 0.43, the PCR is still far below its 52-week high of 0.84, so the hedging isn't extreme — but the directional shift is clear.
The Street is split, and the valuation backdrop does some of the explaining. Bulls point to a 79% year-over-year surge in the product segment backlog to $295 million and raised 2025 revenue guidance of $960-$980 million. Bears counter that electricity revenue has disappointed, coming in below both consensus and company forecasts, with gross margins sliding to 25.6% — a level that dents the premium the stock typically commands. The consensus mean target of $127 implies about 10% upside from the $115.34 close, though the range is wide: JP Morgan kept its Neutral rating in the most recent action on April 16 and set a target of $106, while Barclays (Overweight) moved its target up to $123 in early March and UBS maintained Buy at $143. The P/E multiple has re-rated upward — now near 48.7x, up roughly 2 points over the past month — which compresses the margin of safety the bears would need to be wrong. The forward EPS growth percentile ranks in the 92nd percentile versus the universe, the factor score that most clearly supports the bull case heading into the print.
The earnings history adds genuine context here. The February 2026 print was punishing: the stock fell 11.4% the next day and was still down 7.9% five days later, driven by the electricity revenue miss and margin compression. That reaction will be fresh in traders' minds tomorrow, and it goes some way toward explaining why shorts have been adding and options buyers have been reaching for puts in the days before this report. BlackRock recently added 176,000 shares to its 14.6% stake, and Geode added 103,000 — passive flow rather than conviction buying, but it underpins the float structure.
What the print resolves is whether the electricity segment has stabilised, and whether the product backlog growth is converting to margin recovery. Those two questions — not the headline revenue number — are what to watch in tomorrow's Q&A.
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