AST SpaceMobile enters the final days of May with a jarring split in its tape: up 7% on the week, down 15% on Friday, and Deutsche Bank just pulled its Buy rating.
The Friday selloff is the week's defining moment. After touching $133 mid-week on the back of last week's SpaceX IPO halo and FCC approval tailwinds, ASTS shed nearly 15% on May 29 to close at $113.41. That single-day reversal didn't erase the weekly gain — the stock is still up 7% from the prior Friday close — but it arrived alongside a meaningful analyst shift. Deutsche Bank's Bryan Kraft downgraded the stock from Buy to Hold and trimmed his target from $117 to $106, a move filed the same day as the selloff. That target now sits below the current price, a signal that even a recently bullish voice on the Street sees limited near-term room.
The positioning picture shows shorts are finally losing conviction after weeks of building. Short interest has dropped about 10% in one week, falling to 18.2% of the free float from a mid-May peak above 21%. That's a meaningful shift — since the previous notes in this series flagged shorts stubbornly rebuilding into the rally, this week marks the first real covering wave. Availability has tightened slightly to 40%, down from the mid-40s earlier in the week, but remains well off the 52-week low of 11%. Cost to borrow is essentially negligible at 0.73% annualised. The short score of 69.3 has drifted down from a recent peak near 70.5 — consistent with the covering trend but still elevated. The ORTEX short score ranks in the 3rd percentile for this metric, meaning very few stocks carry a heavier short load.
Options positioning has turned notably more defensive. The put/call ratio climbed to 0.49 on Friday, more than two standard deviations above its 20-day mean of 0.40 — the highest defensive reading since the 52-week PCR high of 0.70. That jump followed a period of unusually bullish options skew through mid-May, when the PCR hit its 52-week low of 0.32. The shift is sharp. Traders who were loading calls into the rally are now reaching for puts after the Friday flush, a pattern that typically reflects uncertainty rather than outright bearishness.
The Street's consensus stands at Hold — 2 buys against 7 holds — with a mean price target of $82.24. That gap between the $113 close and an $82 consensus target deserves flagging: the stock is trading roughly 38% above where the average analyst thinks it belongs. The most recent moves are directionally negative. UBS trimmed to $80 on May 12. B. Riley raised slightly to $85 but stayed at Neutral. Barclays, which carries an Underweight, has a $65 target. The bull case rests on ASTS's unique IP — direct-to-device 5G from standard handsets — and its expanding MNO partnership book. Bears point to the cash burn, launch dependencies, and Starlink's structural head start. At $113, the market is pricing in the bull scenario; the analyst community, on aggregate, is not.
Insider selling has been persistent and heavy. The 90-day net is over $292 million of stock sold, with Rakuten's Hiroshi Mikitani alone offloading roughly $270 million in April across two tranches near $86–$91. The ASTS president sold another $3.3 million on May 27 at $126.64 — the day before the selloff. The CFO sold twice in May. None of these trades are trivial in size or timing.
On the earnings front, the next print is confirmed for June 12. The most recent quarterly result, on May 11, produced a modest one-day decline of 2.8% but a five-day gain of 15.7% — suggesting the stock found buyers quickly after initial disappointment. The June 12 event arrives with ASTS trading well above consensus targets, a fresh downgrade, heavy insider selling, and options traders the most defensively positioned they've been in months. What to watch: whether short covering continues through the earnings window, or whether the Friday reversal marks the point at which covering stalls and the bears reload.
See the live data behind this article on ORTEX.
Open ASTS 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.
