Faraday Future Intelligent Electric heads into its May 8 earnings print with one of the most heavily shorted float profiles in its sector — and the borrow market is nearly tapped out.
Short sellers control 35.2% of the free float, with around 59.7 million shares short. That figure is up roughly 8.5% over the past month, even as the stock has rallied 69% in that same period. Availability has tightened severely — the borrow pool is almost fully exhausted, with availability near its most constrained level of the past year. Cost to borrow runs at 13.5% annualised, up around 9% on the week. The ORTEX short score of 74.1 ranks in the bottom 3rd percentile of the entire universe on short score rank, flagging extreme bearish positioning by almost any measure.
Options traders are telling a different story. The put/call ratio is a remarkably low 0.115 — essentially at the 52-week floor of 0.095 and far below the 52-week high of 0.723. That reading sits right at its 20-day average with a z-score near zero, suggesting options market participants are not hedging into the print. Calls dominate the open interest by a wide margin. The divergence is stark: short sellers are deeply committed, while options flow reflects a bullish lean heading into the announcement.
The single analyst on record — a November 2025 initiation from Litchfield Hills with a Buy rating and a $5.00 target — is now nearly six months stale and should not be treated as current guidance. At $0.40 per share, the stock trades at a steep discount to that target, but the data is too dated to draw conclusions from. What is more recent and notable is the institutional picture: BlackRock and Vanguard both added meaningfully in Q1 2026, with BlackRock increasing its position by approximately 2.7 million shares and Vanguard by 1.9 million. That passive accumulation reflects index-related mechanics, but the directional flow remains additive. Millennium Management, by contrast, cut its holding by roughly 2.4 million shares in Q4 2025.
The most recent earnings event, in late March 2026, saw the stock slip 1.6% on the day before losing 12.2% over the following five sessions. That pattern — a contained initial reaction followed by a larger drift — is the historical context that frames the current setup. With a heavily shorted float, near-zero borrow availability, and a stock that has nearly doubled in a month, the May 8 print is less a test of fundamental delivery and more a test of whether the short-heavy positioning can hold in the face of a momentum-driven tape.
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