Ericsson heads into the post-earnings period with shorts in retreat — but the borrow market telling a more cautious story.
The clearest move this week was in short positioning. After the April 17 Q1 results, shorts covered aggressively. SI fell by roughly 26% over the week to around 43 million shares, pulling the short interest percentage of free float down from a local peak near 2.0% to approximately 1.5%. That is a meaningful flush in absolute share terms, though 1.5% of free float is not a level that signals intense structural conviction from either side.
What catches the eye is the divergence between that short covering and what the borrow market is signalling. Availability — the ratio of shares still available to borrow against those already lent out — has tightened sharply. It stood near 155% in early April, meaning ample supply in the lending pool. It has since dropped to 41.5%, the tightest level in this run and well into the "tight" range. Cost to borrow has moved in the same direction: up 59% over the past month to 1.59% APR, with a 21% jump in the past week alone. The most likely explanation is that while existing shorts covered after the print, new demand for borrows has absorbed much of the freed-up supply — keeping the lending market tighter than the falling SI count alone would suggest.
Options positioning leans modestly bullish. The put/call ratio is running at 0.37, slightly below its 20-day average of 0.41, and the z-score is mildly negative at -0.75. That puts the PCR near the lower end of its recent range but well above the 52-week low of 0.21. There is no strong directional signal in options right now — the market is not loading up on downside protection, but nor is it aggressively chasing calls.
On the Street, the picture is neutral to cautious. The consensus sits at Hold across four analysts. Morgan Stanley initiated coverage in February with an Equal-Weight rating and an $11 target — the most recent data point and the only one recent enough to carry full weight. The mean price target of $10.55 is below the current price of $11.44, meaning the stock is already trading above where analysts collectively see fair value. EV/EBITDA has expanded to 8.8x, up around 0.14x over the past 30 days. The P/E ratio of 16.6x is up nearly a full turn in the same period, reflecting the price drift higher. Factor scores are mixed: the dividend percentile ranks at a perfect 100, reflecting historical consistency, but EPS momentum scores rank in the bottom quintile at 12 for the 30-day measure and 31 for 90 days — a reminder that the earnings revision cycle is still working against the name.
The April 17 Q1 print itself was a useful data point on how Ericsson moves around results. The stock fell 3.2% on the day and 7.3% over the following five days. The January 2026 quarter told the opposite story — a one-day gain of 11.5% and a five-day follow-through of 12.7%. The pattern is asymmetric: big positive surprises get rewarded; misses lead to a more drawn-out drift lower. With the next earnings event pencilled in for July 14, the key question going into that print is whether the EPS revision trend stabilises or continues to deteriorate, given how little headroom the current price leaves above analyst targets.
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