PLUG Earnings Day: Bears Hold Their Ground

Plug Power heads into its Q1 earnings print on June 11 with short sellers having added to positions through the selloff — a setup that makes this report one of the more consequential near-term catalysts in clean energy.

Short sellers are not backing down. Bears now hold 25.8% of the free float, up 4.1% on the week and at its highest reading in the past 30 days. The short score of 71.8 ranks PLUG in the bottom 3rd percentile of all tracked names — meaning shorts are more entrenched here than on nearly 97% of peers. Borrow availability has tightened slightly to 65.8%, down from 85% earlier in the week, while the cost to borrow eased back to 1.26% — still 9% above its month-ago level but well below the intra-week spike to 1.68% flagged in Monday's preview note. The borrow market is firm but not yet stressed; there is no mechanical squeeze pressure forcing covers. Options traders remain notably unbothered, with the put/call ratio at 0.23 — barely a standard deviation above its 20-day mean and near the low end of its 52-week range. That gap between heavy short conviction and relaxed options hedging is the defining tension going into the print.

The stock's 29% drop on the week — to $2.91 — has made the Street's freshly raised targets look generous. Following the last earnings release in May, multiple firms lifted their targets: Susquehanna moved to $3.75, Canaccord to $4.00, B. Riley to $5.00, and TD Cowen to $3.00. Wells Fargo, maintaining its Equal-Weight, nudged its target to $2.50. The consensus sits at Hold, with a mean target of $3.52 — implying roughly 21% upside from current levels, though that gap has compressed fast given this week's decline. BMO Capital remains the outlier bear, with an Underperform and a $1.20 target. The bull case rests on gross margin recovery — from deeply negative today toward a projected 4% by year-end and above 20% by 2027-28 — and a ten-year revenue runway to $14 billion. Bears point to $768 million in Q4 2025 operating expenses including a large impairment, equipment margins still running at a loss, and a nascent hydrogen market that has yet to deliver the demand inflection the bulls require.

The EPS surprise factor score of 88 is a genuine bright spot. PLUG has beaten estimates at a rate that ranks near the top of the universe on that metric. The two most recent earnings events both produced next-day moves of roughly 12-14% to the upside, with five-day gains of 11-21% following each print. That is the pattern worth holding in mind: the stock has rewarded buyers on the day of results recently, even as the underlying business remains loss-making. Whether Q1 can deliver a third consecutive positive surprise — and whether that is enough to shake a short base that added through a 29% weekly decline — is what June 11 is really about.

Peer performance this week reinforces the sector-wide pressure: EOSE fell 33.5%, FCEL dropped 29%, and STEM shed 23%. The clean-energy complex is broadly under pressure, which means PLUG's report lands without a sector tailwind to cushion a miss. What to watch is whether Q1 gross margin shows any meaningful movement toward breakeven — that single line item is the axis around which the bull-bear debate turns.