Intuitive Machines reports Thursday with two days of sharp new data movement — and the picture heading into the June 4 print is more charged than any of the three previous notes captured.
The stock fell 12.8% on Monday to $38.21, erasing most of a brief push above $43. That pullback arrived as borrow availability collapsed to just 1.99% — meaning barely one share remains lendable for every fifty already borrowed. A week ago, availability was near 11%. This is the tightest the lending pool has been in months, and it happened fast. The cost to borrow has risen 27% over the same week to just under 1.1%, still modest in absolute terms but clearly trending. Meanwhile, the put/call ratio hit 0.70 on Monday — a fresh 52-week high and more than four standard deviations above its 20-day average of 0.40. Prior notes flagged the PCR at 0.68 as extreme. It has pushed higher still. These signals are not stable; they are accelerating.
Short interest tells a consistent story with no new twist. It remains at 26.7% of float — the same structural level flagged repeatedly. What's changed is the tightening squeeze on bears: with availability near zero, any new short position is nearly impossible to establish, and existing shorts face an increasingly illiquid exit. The ORTEX short score of 68.9 ranks LUNR in the 4th percentile across the universe. Short sellers built into the rally over the past month; they now hold those positions in a market where borrow has almost entirely dried up.
Analysts are firmly in the bull camp, though the debate has sharpened. Since May 15, every analyst action has been a target raise with no rating changes. Roth Capital went to $75 — a 50% lift from its prior $50 target set just two weeks earlier. Cantor Fitzgerald moved from $26 to $43. The consensus target of $40.78 is now below Monday's close, but the Roth outlier distorts that average heavily; strip it out and most of the Street is at or below current levels. The bull case centres on the 1,150% year-over-year improvement in Q4 gross profit to $8.5 million, the Lanteris acquisition expanding satellite manufacturing capacity, and alignment with rising government lunar spending. Bears point to an EBITDA loss of $19.1 million on $44.8 million in revenue, a widening bottom line, and the risk that lunar programme momentum fades faster than the valuation assumes. The EV/EBITDA multiple, while compressing 38.9 points over the past 30 days as the stock ran, remains at 166x — a level that prices in significant execution.
The founder continues to sell. Kamal Ghaffarian offloaded shares across multiple tranches in May — totalling over $7.9 million — at prices ranging from $25 to $38. Citadel and D.E. Shaw both added meaningful new positions in Q1. ARK and Van Eck each built stakes further in April. The ownership picture is therefore split: institutional quants and thematic funds buying, the founder trimming consistently into every leg higher. The last comparable earnings event in May produced a 5% one-day decline and a 4% five-day decline. The print before that delivered a 10.8% one-day gain.
Thursday's report is therefore a test of whether the fundamental improvement visible in gross margins is durable enough to justify a stock that has doubled in a month, with its borrow market effectively closed, its options market priced for a sharp move, and its largest individual shareholder selling on the way up.
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