IonQ surged 12% in a single session on Thursday, yet more than a fifth of its free float remains sold short — and the lending pool has almost completely dried up.
The sharpest signal in IonQ's current setup is the borrow market. Availability has collapsed to just 0.14% — meaning for every 700 shares already out on loan, fewer than one remains available to borrow. That is the tightest the lending pool has been all year, and the move accelerated this week: availability fell nearly 99% over the past five trading days. This is an extreme reading, matching levels last seen in mid-April when the borrow briefly touched 0.10%. The cost to borrow has actually eased to 1.32% — down roughly 27% on the week and 32% over the past month — which tells its own story: demand for new shorts is not the driver here. The pool is tight because existing positions are fully drawn, not because fresh short sellers are piling in at elevated borrow rates.
Short interest itself has barely moved. At 23.6% of the free float, with around 83.6 million shares short, the position has been essentially flat for six weeks — oscillating in a narrow band between 82 and 85 million shares since mid-April. That structural stability, even as the stock climbed 22% in a month and 2.5% this week, signals a cohort of shorts unwilling to cover into the rally. The ORTEX short score holds at 70.2, in the top few percentiles for squeeze pressure across the universe. Options positioning is largely neutral, with the put/call ratio at 1.02 — barely above its 20-day average of 1.02 and well within a single standard deviation — suggesting options traders are neither pressing for protection nor positioning aggressively for the upside.
The Street is cautiously constructive but far from unified. JP Morgan raised its target to $50 from $42 earlier this month while maintaining a Neutral rating — a meaningful lift, but still well below the current $58.89 price. Wedbush was more bullish, taking its target to $75 on an Outperform. The consensus sits at Hold, with the mean price target of $67.64 implying modest upside. Bulls point to IonQ's consistent ability to beat its own guidance, a strong backlog, and the strategic rationale behind the SkyWater Technologies acquisition, which would give it full vertical integration across its quantum supply chain. Bears counter that quantum computing adoption timelines remain deeply uncertain, customer concentration is a live risk, and the company is burning cash — a P/B of 4.8 and a deeply negative EV/EBITDA of minus 63x reflect how much future promise is already priced in. EPS momentum over 30 days ranks in the 85th percentile, suggesting near-term estimate revisions have been running hot — but the 90-day figure drops to the 28th percentile, a reminder that upgrade momentum can fade quickly.
Institutional ownership gives some texture to the bull side. Vanguard added roughly 457,000 shares to reach an 8.9% stake, while Morgan Stanley's investment management arm built a position of nearly 17.6 million shares — adding 959,000 in the most recent quarter. Two Sigma entered with 2.3 million shares, essentially a fresh position. Insider activity tells a softer story: the Executive Chairman sold in May, April, and March, and the CEO and CFO both sold in mid-March, though all trades were small relative to the float and carry low significance scores.
IonQ's closest peer, QUBT, surged 19% on the day while losing 2.7% on the week — a volatile backdrop that mirrors IonQ's own session-to-session swings. CAN fell 21.7% over the week, underscoring how indiscriminate the selling has been across speculative tech names when sentiment turns.
Next earnings are scheduled for June 16. With borrow availability this close to zero and nearly a quarter of the float still short, that date will determine whether the existing short base sees enough in the results to hold — or starts looking for the exit.
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