FMS heads into its May 21 earnings report with a notable disconnect: short sellers have been covering aggressively, yet the cost to borrow has surged to its highest level in months.
The most striking feature of the lending market is the cost to borrow spike. Borrow costs more than doubled over the past month to 8.98%, after briefly touching 22.5% on May 12. That intraday spike is consistent with a borrow squeeze — a sudden demand surge from traders scrambling to establish or maintain short positions even as supply tightens. Availability has tightened sharply too, dropping to around 5% of the borrowing pool — one share left for every twenty out on loan, compared to a 52-week high of roughly 27%. That combination of rising cost and near-depleted availability points to meaningful pressure in the lending market.
Short interest itself tells a different story from the borrow cost. Short sellers have retreated steadily over the past month, with estimated short positions down 22% from their April peak and falling another 7% in the most recent session. The ORTEX short score of 33.5 sits in the bottom quartile of the universe — not a heavily shorted name. With days to cover at under two days, any short squeeze thesis faces real limits. The options market is also losing its defensive edge: the put/call ratio has fallen to 1.41, well below the 20-day average of 2.11. That shift — nearly 1.6 standard deviations below the mean — marks options traders moving away from downside protection just ahead of the print, an unusual posture given the stock's history.
That history is worth noting. The last two earnings events produced single-day moves of -7.2% and -10.2% respectively, with five-day follow-through losses of -1.8% and -3.2%. The stock is already down 7% over the past month to $21.60, and the valuation picture reflects prolonged compression: the P/B of 0.61 and P/E of 6.7 both suggest the market has long been skeptical of recovery. EV/EBITDA of 4.2 is low, even for a healthcare services company facing structural headwinds. The dividend score ranks in the 97th percentile, though the actual dividend data on record is stale — Fresenius SE & Co. KGaA remains the dominant shareholder at 31%, anchoring the register with no recent change in position.
The May 21 print will test whether Q1 2026 results — and any forward guidance on the company's ongoing restructuring — can change the narrative that has weighed on the stock through two consecutive earnings-day selloffs.
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