NIO has dropped another 8.4% this week to $5.26, extending the post-earnings slide — and the data shows short sellers are now quietly pressing the position back toward levels not seen since early May.
Short interest has climbed with conviction. Shares short rose 5.1% across the week to 140.9 million — reversing a multi-week decline and building back toward the ~146 million peak from the first week of May. That is the clearest sign that the cover-and-wait dynamic that preceded the May 21 earnings print has fully expired. Borrow costs remain cheap at 0.64% annualised, offering little friction to new shorts entering the name. The more notable shift is in availability: the lending pool tightened sharply this week, falling from around 52% to 31.7% — nearly halving in just a few sessions. At its most extreme on May 25, availability hit 27.5%, the tightest reading since early May and well inside the normal range. The 52-week low has touched 0.46%, so there is headroom to tighten further, but the direction of travel is unmistakable.
Options positioning, however, is not amplifying the bearish case. The put/call ratio has settled back toward 0.72, effectively flat against its 20-day average — and well below the near-two-standard-deviation defensive spike recorded last week. After the sharp post-earnings rotation toward protection, options traders appear to have exhaled. The PCR is now almost precisely neutral, sitting mid-range between its 52-week low of 0.61 and high of 0.80. That divergence — shorts rebuilding while options retreat to neutral — is the central tension in the setup right now.
The Street remains divided, and recent analyst data is now stale enough to require care. The most recent action in the snapshot is HSBC's upgrade to Buy with a $6.80 target back in March 2026 — which at current prices of $5.26 still implies modest upside, and is the freshest move available. Prior changes from late 2025, including cuts from Citi and a downgrade from Macquarie to Neutral, reflect a period when NIO was trading at different levels, and targets from that cluster ranged from $4.00 to $8.50. The consensus mean price target of $47 in the raw data appears to reflect a currency or listing mismatch and should be disregarded. The ORTEX factor score flags an extreme analyst recommendation divergence — ranked at the 98th percentile — which corroborates the genuinely split nature of Street opinion. EPS surprise scores very high at the 94th percentile, yet EPS momentum sits at the bottom of the range (1st percentile), suggesting the company beats low bars but estimates are still falling. The short score of 61.7 ranks in the 9th percentile of the universe — a high bearish signal relative to peers.
Among correlated names, XPEV gained 9.9% on the week and 6.2% in a single session on Tuesday — a sharp divergence from NIO's continued weakness. LI fell 4.9%, tracking closer to NIO's direction. That split within the Chinese EV complex suggests the pressure on NIO is at least partly name-specific rather than purely a sector rotation.
The next catalyst is a June 4 earnings event. With shorts adding, the borrow market tightening, and the stock down 15% in a month, the lens on that print will be less about whether NIO is growing and more about whether management can credibly narrow the gap between delivery volumes and the market share the premium positioning is supposed to justify.
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