HYLIION heads into its Q1 2026 earnings today with the market sending a strikingly bullish signal — but short sellers are not yet convinced.
The options market is the loudest voice here. The put/call ratio has dropped to 0.15, more than two standard deviations below its 20-day average of 0.18. That is the most aggressively call-skewed reading of the past year — traders are buying upside, not hedging. That repositioning tracks with a remarkable run in the stock: HYLN is up 46% over the past month and 16% on the week to $2.68, with RSI climbing to a red-hot 81.5. The stock is in momentum territory by almost any technical measure.
Short sellers are leaning the other way. At nearly 7.8% of free float — and 11.1% on the broader ORTEX estimate — short interest has been building steadily, up about 5% over the past month. The ORTEX short score of 74.7 ranks in the 2nd percentile of the universe, placing HYLN among the most shorted names across the market. Yet borrow conditions remain relaxed. Cost to borrow is just 0.62% annually, down 13% on the week, and availability is ample at roughly 192% of current short interest. With days to cover at 14 on the FINRA print, any forced covering would take time — there is no squeeze pressure here today, just a persistent short thesis meeting a surging price.
The analyst picture is thin and dated. Johnson Rice initiated coverage at Buy with a $5.00 target back in October 2025, a note now more than six months old. With the stock at $2.68, that target implies substantial upside, though it represents the only formal analyst voice on record. The institutional base adds an interesting wrinkle: CEO Thomas Healy holds nearly 20% of shares, and in early March the entire C-suite — CEO, CFO, CTO, Chief Strategy Officer and Chief Commercial Officer — all sold small parcels on the same day. The values were modest, well under $125,000 combined, and significance scores were low. But the coordinated timing is the kind of detail that short sellers with a 74.7 score will already have noted. Peers were mostly weaker on Tuesday: NNE fell 4.4% and SMR dropped nearly 10%, while NPWR bucked the group with a 21.6% gain, suggesting energy transition names are trading on company-specific news rather than sector tone.
The earnings call will test whether the commercial traction behind HYLN's 46-point rally is real, or whether a thin analyst consensus and a coordinated insider exit in March tell the more durable story.
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