Li Auto enters the final days of May with the post-earnings selloff still grinding lower and the Street trimming targets even after the stock already touched a 52-week low.
The price action this week has been unrelenting. LI closed at $15.01 on May 29, down 5.5% on the week and 15.6% over the past month. That extends the damage from last week's earnings shock — a Q1 EPS miss of -$0.30 against a $0.07 estimate and Q2 revenue guidance roughly $600 million below consensus. The stock has found no floor since. Meanwhile, close peers XPEV gained 5.2% on the week and NIO is flat, sharpening the contrast within Chinese EV names.
The most notable development this week is fresh analyst action right at current price levels. Barclays cut its target from $18 to $14 on May 29 — below where the stock already trades — while maintaining Equal-Weight. The move signals conviction that there is limited near-term catalyst for recovery. Earlier in the day, Macquarie upgraded the stock from Underperform to Neutral, a tactical step up but with no target attached and no obvious bullish thesis. JP Morgan, from its March note, carries an Underweight with a $15.50 target — almost exactly at current price — which reinforces the sense that the Street sees this as fairly valued at best rather than as a compelling entry. The broader drift of analyst activity over the past six months has been consistently negative: Jefferies downgraded in January, HSBC downgraded in December, and targets across the board have been walking down from the high $20s. The mean price target of $134.61 shown in the data is almost certainly a legacy figure that does not reflect the current ADR-level price, and should be disregarded.
The lending market has eased slightly from its most extreme readings but remains very tight. Availability has recovered to around 4.7% after touching near-zero on multiple sessions — including 0.47% on May 21 — meaning fewer than one share is available to borrow for every twenty already lent out. That is a structurally constrained borrow market, even if it has loosened marginally from the worst levels seen in the days ahead of the earnings print. Cost to borrow has pulled back sharply, falling almost 29% on the week to just over 1%, which is low in absolute terms. Short interest itself has drifted only fractionally — roughly flat over the past month at around 22.4 million shares — suggesting shorts are neither aggressively covering nor adding meaningfully at these levels.
Options positioning has tilted noticeably more bullish than usual, with the put/call ratio at 0.61 — close to its 52-week low of 0.61 and nearly 1.4 standard deviations below the 20-day average of 0.68. That marks the most call-skewed positioning of the past year. Against the backdrop of continued price weakness, this divergence is striking: options traders are leaning toward calls while the stock continues lower, which could reflect cheap call buying after the selloff rather than genuine directional conviction. The contrast with the tight borrow market and flat short interest is worth watching.
Factor scores add nuance to the picture. The EPS momentum rank over 30 days is in the 98th percentile — the forward earnings revision trend has turned sharply higher in the near term — and EPS surprise ranks in the 95th percentile, meaning the company has historically beaten estimates. Those are genuinely positive data points. But the 90-day EPS momentum rank collapses to the 4th percentile, and the analyst recommendation differential ranks in the 7th percentile, pointing to persistent Street skepticism. The short score of 61.5 has been easing gradually from 63.8 two weeks ago — a modest softening but still elevated. ORTEX's utilization rank for the stock is in the 3rd percentile of the universe, reflecting how tight the borrow market remains relative to peers.
With no next earnings date set, the near-term watch points are whether Barclays' below-market target catalyses further analyst reductions, whether the call-skewed options positioning finds fundamental support, and whether borrow availability continues its tentative drift higher or snaps back toward the near-zero readings that preceded last week's earnings print.
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