Knightscope enters its May 18 investor update carrying one of the most congested short books in its history — 24% of the float is sold short, availability is near rock bottom, and the stock has shed 13% in a month.
Short positioning here is not subtle. SI has climbed 44% in just the past month, reaching 23.97% of the free float as of May 14. The borrowing market reflects that pressure: availability has tightened sharply, with utilization at 95% — against a 52-week peak of 100% hit earlier in the year, meaning barely one share remains free to borrow for every twenty already lent out. Cost to borrow has eased slightly on the week, down 9% to around 10.1% APR, but that follows a 13% rise over the prior month. Days to cover, at roughly 10.98 by the screening data, means it would take nearly eleven trading days for shorts to fully unwind at current volumes. The ORTEX short score of 78.2 sits in just the 2nd percentile of the universe — extreme by any measure.
Q1 results, released after the close on May 15, give the bears something to work with. EPS came in at -$0.74, missing the $0.54 estimate by $0.19. Revenue, however, doubled year-on-year to $6.0M, beating the $3.65M consensus by a wide margin. The revenue beat reflects the acquisition of Event Risk LLC in late February, which pushed Knightscope into licensed security services and meaningfully expanded its contract base. The EPS miss is the harder number to dismiss — the company remains loss-making, and the cash position and debt load are real constraints flagged consistently by analysts covering the name.
The Street is uniformly constructive in rating but divided on how much that's worth at $2.95. Both Ascendiant Capital and HC Wainwright carry Buy ratings. Ascendiant nudged its target to $26 in mid-April — a level that implies a roughly 780% premium to Friday's close. HC Wainwright's target is more measured at $12, still four times the current price. The mean analyst target of $15.33 represents over 400% upside on paper. That gap is less a signal of imminent re-rating and more a reflection of how far the stock has drifted from where analysts have modelled it. The RSI of 39.5 puts the stock in oversold territory, but not yet at an extreme, and the price-to-book multiple of 15x sits uncomfortably high for a company with negative earnings yield.
The earnings reaction history offers one genuine data point: after the most recent comparable print in March 2026, the stock rose 14.3% on the day and held a further 10.2% gain through the five-day window. That move followed revenue numbers that appear to have surprised similarly to the beat just posted. Bulls will point to that precedent; bears will note shorts have added materially since then and availability has tightened further.
The next event on record is the Q1 2026 Earnings Call on May 18, two days away. With availability near its tightest level in a year, borrowing costs elevated, and fresh earnings data now in the hands of both sides, the tension between a sharp revenue beat and a missed EPS line will drive how aggressively new shorts can be added — or whether existing ones choose to cover.
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