Lucid Group's lending market has been fully locked for weeks. Every share available to borrow is already lent out — availability has sat at 0% for most of April. Yet options traders are making an aggressive contrarian move.
The put/call ratio on LCID fell to 1.15 on April 27. That is 2.3 standard deviations below its 20-day mean of 1.52. Call buyers are driving that shift. This comes against a backdrop of a stock down 37% in a month and 12% in the past week alone.
The lending pool is as tight as it gets. Availability has been effectively 0% — every share in the pool is lent out — for all but one session since late March. That single exception was April 22, when utilization briefly dipped to 97%.
What makes this unusual is the cost to borrow has collapsed simultaneously. CTB stood at 7.43% as of April 27, down 69% from 30 days ago when it was running above 23%. In mid-April it briefly spiked to 33.3% before retreating sharply. A fully locked borrow market at a low and falling cost-to-borrow suggests the supply of lendable shares shrank dramatically — not that new short demand appeared. Short sellers may have locked in their positions early, at higher rates, and the lending pool simply has nothing left to offer new entrants at any price.
Short interest stands at approximately 13.9% of free float, up about 4.5% over the past month.
The drop in PCR to 1.15 — its lowest reading in the recent window — stands out. For a name this heavily shorted and this far down, call activity spiking relative to puts is a notable divergence. The 52-week PCR range is 0.10 to 2.42, so there is room to move in either direction. But the current z-score of -2.3 places this firmly in territory where call buyers are taking an unusually aggressive stance.
An earnings event is scheduled for May 5. That is likely pulling some of the options activity. The most recent analyst moves were both negative: TD Cowen cut its target from $19 to $10 on April 15, and Baird trimmed from $14 to $12 the same day. Both maintained neutral-equivalent ratings. The consensus target sits at $12.77 against a current price of $5.93 — implying substantial upside on paper, though that gap has been steadily shrinking as targets fall.
Uber's strategic stake — 37.8 million shares added as of April 14 — remains a notable structural holder alongside Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund at 48.7% of shares.
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