Rocket Lab Corporation heads into its May 11 earnings report with short sellers rebuilding positions at a notably faster pace than the preceding month — a divergence from analysts, who have been lifting targets into the release.
Short interest has risen sharply over the past month, up 37% to 6.4% of the free float, with the bulk of that move concentrated in the final two weeks of April. From April 23 onwards, shares short climbed from roughly 26 million to 34 million. Despite that build, the borrow market remains loose: the cost to borrow is a negligible 0.40%, and the borrow pool has ample capacity, meaning shorts can add or exit positions cheaply and easily. Options traders are equally calm — the put/call ratio of 0.77 is close to its 20-day average of 0.75, with a z-score of just 0.69. Neither the lending market nor the options market is signalling urgency. The stock itself fell 7.2% on May 7 alone and is down nearly 5% on the week, even as it retains a 16% gain over the past month, closing at $78.58.
Analysts have been moving in the opposite direction from short sellers. Stifel raised its target to $105 on April 20, while Roth Capital pushed to $100 the same week. Citizens upgraded to Market Outperform on April 7 with an $85 target. The consensus mean sits at $89.88, implying roughly 14% upside from current levels. Wells Fargo struck the most conservative note, initiating at Equal-Weight with a $60 target — the only clear dissenter in a predominantly bullish analyst pack. Goldman Sachs, also on the skeptical side, carries a Neutral rating at $69. The bull case rests on accelerating demand for small satellite launches and an expanding backlog, while bears point to a pre-profit model burning cash — the most recent quarterly estimate shows a net loss of roughly $45 million on $189 million in revenue — alongside execution risk, competition, and a $39 billion market cap that already prices in considerable success.
Institutional ownership has been building. Vanguard added over 6 million shares to reach 8.2% of shares outstanding in Q1. JP Morgan Asset Management added 3.5 million shares in the same period, while BlackRock added 1.7 million. Against that backdrop, the only notable insider activity has been selling: the COO and General Counsel both disposed of shares in early March at prices in the low-to-mid $70s, though those were small transactions relative to the overall institutional flow.
The EPS surprise factor score ranks in the 90th percentile, reflecting a track record of beating expectations — but EPS momentum over the past 30 and 90 days is deep in the bottom decile, suggesting the forward estimate path has been drifting lower even as the stock ran. Monday's print will test whether revenue growth and any narrowing of losses are enough to validate targets that have moved well above where the stock now trades.
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