Sidus Space enters the final days of May with a striking disconnect: short sellers have been racing for the exit while the stock has surged more than 70% in a single week — a classic forced-exit dynamic playing out in real time.
The price action this week has been aggressive. SIDU closed at $6.20 on Tuesday, up 21% on the day and 72% over the trailing five sessions, extending a one-month gain to more than 81%. The move appears largely stock-specific. Close peers RDW and FLY also had strong weeks — up 58% and 34% respectively — suggesting some sector tailwind in small-cap aerospace names. But SIDU's gain was the most violent, consistent with a squeeze dynamic rather than a pure sector re-rating.
Short positioning tells the covering story clearly. SI as a percentage of free float dropped from roughly 9.5% on May 21 to 7.3% on May 26 — a meaningful unwind — and is now down about 31% from its late-April peak of nearly 12%. That's a sharp reduction, though with 7% of the float still short, the position is far from clean. What makes the setup interesting is what happened to the lending market simultaneously: availability, which had been very tight for weeks — dropping to near zero in mid-to-late April — has loosened sharply to 59.7%, versus just 8–17% through most of May. More shares available to borrow now than at any point in the last month. Cost to borrow has also eased hard, falling to 3.9% from roughly 10% in late April. The borrow market is signalling that the most urgent short demand has already been cleared.
Options positioning corroborates a bullish tilt. The put/call ratio has drifted to 0.44, well below its 20-day average of 0.51 and sitting roughly 1.6 standard deviations below that mean. Call-side demand is dominating relative to recent history. That's consistent with the price action — momentum traders piling in on the call side, rather than hedgers loading up on puts. The ORTEX short score has also eased from 64.4 to 59.5 over the past week, reflecting the covering pressure.
The fundamental backdrop remains thin. The only analyst record on file is a ThinkEquity Buy initiation from April 2024 with a $10 target — a stale data point and not a meaningful current signal. Valuation multiples are similarly sparse. What the snapshot does reveal is a deeply challenged quality profile: a negative return on assets and an F-Score of 1 confirm that the price surge is driven by positioning dynamics and momentum, not improving fundamentals. Institutional ownership is modest, with Citadel showing a notable new position of 3.2 million shares as of April 21 — worth flagging as the largest recently-added institutional stake.
The one near-term catalyst on the calendar is the next earnings release, scheduled for August 13. The May print delivered a 23% one-day move and a 27% five-day gain, which set the stage for much of the current momentum. That reaction gives shorts and momentum longs alike a concrete date to frame positioning around. Between now and then, the story reduces to whether the covering pressure has truly run its course at 7% of float, or whether the remaining short base finds a reason to add back.
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