AIRJ heads into its Q1 2026 earnings report today with a stock that has rallied hard and short sellers quietly building positions into the move.
The price action sets a complicated stage. AIRJ has climbed 31% in a month to $3.92, including a 13% gain over the past week alone. Yet options positioning has turned notably more defensive right at the top. The put/call ratio jumped to 0.162 — more than two standard deviations above its 20-day average of 0.113. That is the most hedged the options market has been for this stock in recent memory, with the PCR z-score of 2.28 suggesting traders are buying protection against the rally reversing on the print.
Short sellers have been quietly adding throughout the run-up. SI has risen 26% in a month to 4.3% of the free float — a meaningful build for a small-cap name. Days to cover run to nine sessions based on FINRA data, meaning any squeeze would take time to unwind. Borrow costs remain modest at just over 1%, so shorting is not yet expensive. Availability has tightened noticeably though — utilization now runs at 43.5%, up from the mid-30s a few weeks ago, and still well below the 52-week peak of 60%. The lending pool is narrowing but far from exhausted.
The analyst community is uniformly bullish, though the conviction comes largely from smaller specialist firms. Seaport Global initiated coverage with a Buy and a $7 target just last week — the most recent and notable addition to a chorus that also includes Lucid Capital Markets and Ladenburg Thalmann, both of which started coverage in December. HC Wainwright holds a $12 target. Against a current price of $3.92, the mean target of $8.35 implies substantial upside — but the case rests almost entirely on future technology commercialization, not near-term financials. The company is burning cash, with an estimated net loss near $19 million and operating cash outflow of around $7.9 million against minimal revenue. EPS surprise ranks in the 97th percentile historically, but that statistic is almost meaningless for a pre-revenue company where any reported figure is effectively a miss against zero.
The ownership structure adds one point of genuine interest. Insiders bought in January — CEO Matthew Jore and Executive Chairman Patrick Eilers both purchased shares at $3.25 — before accepting stock awards and selling token amounts in February. Three Curve Capital holds 27% of the company, creating a concentrated ownership base that limits the genuine free float. That concentration, combined with nine-day DTC, means a positive surprise could move the stock sharply. The last earnings event — Q4 results in late March — sent the stock down 10.7% on the day and a further 5.9% over the following week. Today's print will test whether the 30% rally since that drop was justified by any improvement in the underlying business trajectory.
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