Rocket Lab heads into next week's earnings with the stock up nearly 50% in five sessions, analysts chasing targets higher, and short sellers quietly exiting a position that was still being built just three weeks ago.
The price move is the unavoidable starting point. RKLB closed Tuesday at $117.56, a 49% gain over the week and 73% higher on the month. Q1 results on May 7 drove a 24.6% single-day gap, followed by a secondary event on May 11 that added another 11.5%. No close peer came close to that magnitude: LUNR gained 29% on the week, RDW rose 33%, but both are working from much smaller bases. The space-tech cohort broadly rallied; Rocket Lab led.
Short sellers have been wrong-footed and are covering. SI fell from roughly 6.4% of the free float on May 6 to 5.9% by May 12 — a six-day unwind of around 2.3 million shares. The month-long picture is starker: shorts added almost 27% more exposure between early April and early May, building into a stock that then doubled in six weeks. Borrow availability remains generous. Cost to borrow is running at just 0.42%, and the 52-week high on availability was 100% — meaning at points this year the entire estimated short position could have been covered with shares still remaining in the pool. The lending market is simply not stressed, even as short interest inches lower. That rules out a mechanical squeeze; the covering looks voluntary.
The analyst community has moved almost entirely in one direction. Post-earnings, Needham raised its target to $120 (from $95) and TD Cowen matched that move from $90, both within the past five days and both maintaining Buy ratings. Citizens also lifted its target to $95. Taken together, the Street is playing catch-up with the tape — a pattern that started in April with Stifel and Roth Capital both raising targets ahead of earnings. The note of caution comes from Wells Fargo, which initiated in April with an Equal-Weight and a $60 target. At the current price of $117, that target looks heavily stale, but it represents the lone dissenting voice in an otherwise bullish chorus. The headline mean price target of $89.88 is almost certainly lagging the recent flurry of raises; the stock has now traded above the prior consensus for weeks. Valuation carries no conventional anchor — the P/E is deeply negative and the EV/EBITDA runs into the tens of thousands — so the Street is buying a growth story, not a multiples story. EPS surprise ranks in the 91st percentile and 30-day EPS momentum is in the 95th, suggesting estimates are accelerating even as the stock runs.
Options positioning is mildly more cautious than usual but nowhere near defensive extremes. The put/call ratio came into the week at 0.78, fractionally above its 20-day average and close to — but still below — the 52-week high of 0.82. At less than one standard deviation above the mean, the options market is not pricing in fear. Institutional holders broadly added during Q1: Vanguard added 6.1 million shares, Capital Research added 1.7 million, and JP Morgan Asset Management added 3.5 million in its most recently reported period. The ORTEX short score has drifted lower all week, from 43.5 on May 4 to 40.6 by May 12 — reflecting the easing short pressure as covering accelerates. The score ranks only in the 27th percentile of the universe, meaning this is far from a crowded short by aggregate signal.
The next confirmed earnings event is listed as May 20. With the stock already pricing in strong execution — and having gapped higher on back-to-back events in the past week — what the market watches next is whether management provides a specific timeline for the Neutron rocket programme and whether the launch cadence guidance holds at current implied valuations. The bear case centres on Neutron uncertainty and M&A integration; the bull case leans on vertical integration and national security contract flow. Both of those debates come back into focus in seven days.
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