FLY enters its June 4 earnings release with options traders leaning decisively to the upside — yet the stock has just dropped 11% in a week after a 31% monthly run, making the debate between bulls and bears genuinely live.
Options positioning captures the bullish lean most clearly. The put/call ratio has fallen to 0.33, well below its 20-day average of 0.40, and sits near the most call-heavy reading of the past year — the 52-week low in PCR is 0.00, with the 52-week high a distant 1.63. That is a pointed contrast to the defensive posturing typically seen ahead of a binary event. Meanwhile, the borrow market remains loosely configured: availability runs at 73%, well up from tighter readings below 30% seen in early May, and the cost to borrow has eased to 0.86% from above 1.4% a month ago. At 5.4% of the free float, short interest is meaningful but not extreme, and it edged lower in the most recent session even as the weekly trend has been rising — a split signal worth watching.
The analyst community has drifted more cautious than the options tape implies. Morgan Stanley's Kristine Liwag raised her target to $37 on May 5 while holding at Equal-Weight — still well below the current $44.24 price. Goldman Sachs sits at Neutral with a $32 target. Against those sideline calls, Roth Capital's April raise to $60 and Jefferies' Buy at $45 represent the more optimistic corner of the Street. The mean target sits at $47, modestly above the current price, but the distribution is wide and the ratings skew toward Hold. The bull case rests on Firefly's expanding mission backlog, a diverse government and commercial customer base, and what the EPS momentum factor score — sitting in the 99th percentile over 90 days — implies about earnings revision direction. Bears counter with the company's pre-profitability status: the PE and EV/EBITDA multiples are both negative, the price-to-book has expanded sharply over 30 days to 8.7x, and any launch delay or anomaly carries outsized revenue consequences for a young operator still on the path to breakeven.
The recent peer divergence adds texture. RKLB gained 14% on the week while LUNR rose 28%, suggesting the commercial space cohort caught a sector bid that FLY only partially participated in before Monday's 5% pullback. RDW surged 60% on the week — a reminder of how violent re-ratings can be in this corner of the market. FLY's 31% monthly rise already prices in a degree of optimism, which narrows the margin for error if the Q1 print disappoints on revenue trajectory or raises questions about the funding runway.
Thursday's report tests whether Firefly's revenue growth and mission pipeline justify a price-to-book that has doubled in a month, at a moment when the options market is positioned for celebration and the short interest trend is quietly creeping higher.
See the live data behind this article on ORTEX.
Open FLY 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.
