AUR just delivered the week that bulls had been waiting for — and it arrived with back-to-back newsflow catalysts.
The stock closed at $6.53 on May 5, up 32% on the week and 57% over the past month, driven by an expanding commercial footprint and a Q1 earnings beat. On May 6, Aurora reported Q1 EPS of -$0.11, beating the -$0.12 estimate. Revenue of $1.0 million edged past the $969K consensus. Simultaneously, Aurora announced a new autonomous freight partnership with McLane Company to serve the U.S. restaurant supply chain, and expanded its Volvo Autonomous Solutions routes with a new 200-mile Dallas-to-Oklahoma City corridor. The stock has repriced sharply on that combination.
The short side tells a more complicated story. At 11.8% of the free float, short interest is elevated — and it barely moved on the week. The weekly change was a marginal +0.2%, with 188.3 million shares short as of May 5. That stickiness matters: shorts did not rush for the exits despite a 32% weekly price spike. Borrow remains cheap at 0.79% annualised, having declined roughly 9% over the past month. Availability is not yet at a pressure point — utilisation is running near 37.6%, close to but just below the 52-week high of 38.2%. At that level, the lending pool is moderately tight but far from stressed. There is no acute squeeze signal in the borrow market — yet.
Options positioning reinforces the bull-dominated tone. The put/call ratio is 0.15, well below its 52-week high of 0.47 and essentially at the low end of its recent range. Relative to the 20-day average of 0.15, the reading is flat — the z-score is mildly negative at -0.55. This week's call-heavy activity attracted separate market commentary. Options traders bought high volumes of calls on May 6, consistent with momentum-chasing rather than hedging. There is little options-market caution here.
Analyst coverage remains mixed, and the current price already sits above most targets. Goldman Sachs' Mark Delaney raised his target to $5.00 on April 17, keeping a Neutral rating — meaningful given the timing, but the stock has already blown through that level. Needham's Chris Pierce holds a Buy with a $13.00 target, implying further upside from current levels. TD Cowen sits at Hold with a $4.70 target. The mean price target across the Street is $10.59, which implies roughly 62% upside from $6.53 — but with the stock having just surged 57% in a month, several bears will argue the easy move has happened. EPS momentum ranks in just the 10th percentile on a 30-day basis, and the forward EPS growth score is at the 3rd percentile. The bear case is concrete: Aurora recognised just $1 million in quarterly revenue against an operating cost base running near $200 million annually.
Institutional ownership adds colour to the conviction picture. Uber Technologies holds 16.6% of shares and has not moved its position. T. Rowe Price reported a massive addition of 160 million shares in the quarter to March 31, lifting its stake to 14.2% — a significant vote of confidence from a large active manager. Vanguard added 17.8 million shares over the same period. Toyota, another strategic holder at 2.4%, also held steady. Founder and CEO Christopher Urmson purchased $1 million of stock at $3.88 in November 2025, now sitting on a near-70% gain on that trade. Recent insider selling in February — by the CFO, President, and General Counsel at $4.86 — looks modest in scale relative to those institutional inflows, and predates the latest surge.
The next scheduled earnings event is May 21. By then, investors will be parsing whether the McLane partnership and Volvo route expansion translate into revenue recognition beyond the current $1 million quarterly run rate — and whether the shorts who absorbed this week's move begin to feel pressure as availability tightens further.
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