Tesla enters the final stretch of May having given back the week's gains and then some — down 6.8% over seven days to $404.11 — yet the bear case has not materially intensified. The most interesting tension is that the stock is now trading below the analyst consensus target, the price has retreated, and yet neither shorts nor options traders have pressed the accelerator.
The short position has been essentially flat this week after a month of steady rebuilding. At 2.31% of free float, it is lower than the 2.71% reading reported in last week's note — a meaningful drop that reflects the week's price decline compressing the float-adjusted calculation rather than any large covering event. In raw share terms, the 77 million estimated short is roughly stable. The borrow market tells the same low-conviction story: cost to borrow has more than halved over the week to 0.28%, one of the cheapest readings in the past six weeks. Availability remains extraordinarily loose — there is no lending constraint here whatsoever. Options positioning reinforces this picture. The put/call ratio is 0.75, almost exactly in line with its 20-day average of 0.75, with a z-score near zero. Neither side is making a bold statement with options. Positioning overall looks calm, not charged.
The Street remains broadly bullish despite a softening price. The analyst mean target is $412 — fractionally above the current $404 close — which means Tesla has slipped back into a position where the consensus nominally implies upside, the opposite of last week's note where the stock was trading above its target. The most recent cluster of analyst activity, from around the April 22 earnings date, saw targets move in both directions: Wedbush held at $600, TD Cowen at $490, Cantor Fitzgerald at $510, while Mizuho cut from $540 to $480 and UBS nudged up to $364 while staying at Neutral. That data is now roughly four weeks old and carries the usual caveat that prices have moved since. What's notable is the 94th-percentile ranking for analyst recommendation dispersion — the Street is more divided on this stock than almost any other in the universe. On valuation, the trailing PE has eased to 182x from 190x the week before as the price dropped, and EV/EBITDA has compressed to 88x from 92x. Neither figure changes the fundamental picture: this is an expensive stock by any conventional yardstick, and the ORTEX factor score on EPS surprise ranks at just the 16th percentile, suggesting the company has not been delivering the kind of beats that would typically justify premium multiples.
Insider activity adds a modest cautionary note. CFO Vaibhav Taneja sold $1.35 million of stock on May 13 at $450 — a price well above where the stock trades today. Director Kathleen Wilson-Thompson liquidated over $5.5 million across several tranches on April 30. Neither sale is large relative to the company's market cap, and both are consistent with routine executive diversification, but combined with the broader pattern of net selling visible in the 90-day data, they point in the same direction as the price action: the people closest to the business are not adding exposure.
The next formal catalyst is the Q2 earnings release scheduled for July 22. The most recent print, on April 22, saw the stock fall 3.3% the following day and extend that to -3.5% over five sessions — a pattern consistent with results that were received, at best, with a shrug. With the stock having now retraced most of the post-April rally, the period between now and July is one to watch for whether the valuation compression continues or whether a fresh catalyst from the autonomy or energy storage businesses resets the narrative.
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