Ondas Inc. ends the week with a striking disconnect — the borrow market remains completely shut while options traders lean bullish and the stock posts a 7% weekly gain.
The lending picture has hardened further since the note published on May 20. Availability is at 0% — every share in the pool is on loan, matching the tightest reading of the past year. That level has now held for multiple consecutive sessions, having collapsed from roughly 17% in early May. Cost to borrow has eased from the mid-1.5% range seen earlier this week back to 1.30%, but that softening in fees has not translated into any loosening of supply. Short interest has continued its grind higher: at 46.7% of the free float, it is up about 3.7% on the week and nearly 11% over the past month. Shorts did not cover into the stock's 20% earnings-day spike on May 14, and they have not covered since — the short base is larger now than at any point in the trailing 30-day history.
Options traders read the setup differently. The put/call ratio has dropped to 0.48, nearly 1.8 standard deviations below its 20-day average of 0.51 — the most call-heavy positioning of the past year. That is not hedging behaviour; it is directional bullish exposure. The divergence between where shorts are positioned and where options traders are leaning is the clearest tension in the stock right now. Both camps are leaning harder into their convictions, not retreating.
The Street provides context for the bull side. Coverage is uniformly positive — Buy or Outperform across all active ratings, with a consensus mean target of $20.13 against a current price of $9.77. Needham reiterated its Buy and $23 target on May 19, the most recent action within the past 14 days. Northland raised its target to $18 in late March. The bull case centres on growing demand for autonomous solutions in defence and critical infrastructure; the bear case flags execution risk from aggressive M&A, dilution, and customer concentration. Valuation multiples are difficult to interpret cleanly — the company carries negative earnings, producing a negative P/E and EV/EBITDA — but the price-to-book of 1.1x reflects how low the stock has run relative to book value.
Insider activity from May 20 adds a modest note of caution. Directors Cohen and Sood, along with the CFO and COO, all filed small sales on the same day — individually minor in dollar terms (the largest was $103k), but a coordinated cluster at the $9.70 level is worth noting. Net insider activity over the trailing 90 days is modestly positive at roughly $647k, so these are trimming moves rather than exits. The ORTEX short score has crept up to 69.5 over the week, a steady move higher from the 69.1 reading on May 15, placing the stock in the 2nd percentile for short score rank — meaning the pressure from short positioning is more extreme than nearly every other name in the universe.
Earnings arrive on August 14. The last print on May 14 produced a 20% one-day jump before a 5-day fade of roughly 19% — a violent round trip that illustrated how fast this stock can move in either direction. With shorts near record levels, zero availability in the lending pool, and call buyers pressing higher, the conditions for outsized volatility remain fully intact into the next catalyst. The question heading into summer is whether the locked-up borrow market begins to relax — or whether it tightens further as the short base grows against an immovable lending ceiling.
See the live data behind this article on ORTEX.
Open ONDS on ORTEX →ORTEX Market Intelligence content is generated by AI from a snapshot of ORTEX's proprietary data. Content is informational only and does not constitute investment advice.
