Nebius Group heads into its May 13 earnings with nearly one-in-five shares sold short — yet the lending market suggests shorts are increasingly squeezed for room to add.
Short interest is genuinely elevated at 19.5% of free float, making it one of the more contested setups in the software universe. What makes the positioning interesting is the direction of travel: SI has fallen about 6% over the past month, even as the stock surged 51% in the same period. The stock pulled back 4.2% on Friday to close at $177.05, but that follows a 14.6% gain on the week. Shorts have been bleeding in a rising market. Borrow conditions are not making their lives easier — the lending pool is close to fully exhausted, with availability running near its tightest of the past year. Cost to borrow remains modest at under 1%, but the structural tightness of the pool — availability has repeatedly touched zero over the past month — means incremental short positions are hard to establish.
Options positioning corroborates the cautious lean. The put/call ratio has climbed to 0.93, its highest reading of the past 52 weeks and more than two standard deviations above its 20-day average of 0.87. That is an unusually large demand for downside protection into the print, even for a stock with this level of short interest.
The fundamental debate splits cleanly. Bulls point to the Meta Platforms and Microsoft contracts, which represent a structural step up in revenue visibility for a vertically integrated AI cloud provider that owns its own data centers and server stack. Bank of America initiated at Buy with a $150 target in March — already well below the current price — while Citigroup added a Buy at $169 and DA Davidson lifted its target to $200. The stock has run past most of those initiation targets in two months. Bears counter with the harder numbers: NBIS has lowered full-year revenue guidance due to supply constraints, missed its 2025 ARR target, and is still deeply loss-making, with a negative P/E and an earnings yield of roughly -1%. The company's $7–9 billion ARR goal for end-2026 is ambitious, and the timing of contract commencements remains a known uncertainty. The ORTEX short score sits at 69.5 — elevated, and consistent across the past two weeks — signalling that bearish conviction is not fading.
Institutional flows add one notable data point. BlackRock built a near-9.4 million share position from essentially nothing, reported as of April 30 — a substantial new foothold at a major passive and active manager. Countering that, insiders have been consistent sellers. A board director sold roughly $3 million across three tranches in the first week of May alone, at prices between $170 and $190. The CEO sold in early April near $104; an unnamed CLO sold at $99 the day before. The pattern is a steady clip of insider distribution into the rally, not a panic — but it is unbroken.
After the last print in late April, NBIS fell 7.7% in a single day before recovering most of the move over the following week. The May 13 report is therefore less a test of whether the AI infrastructure story is intact, and more a question of whether revenue and ARR momentum have finally caught up to a stock trading well above where its most recent analyst targets were set.
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Nebius Group reports Q1 earnings today with short interest down 9% over the past month to 18.9% of float. Put/call ratios have climbed to the highest level in weeks, signaling bearish options positioning ahead of the…
