Li Auto heads into mid-June under genuine pressure — the stock has shed 22% in a month, shorts are building fast, and the lending pool is almost completely dry.
The borrow market tells the most urgent part of the story. Availability has tightened to just 4.3% — meaning for every 100 shares already lent out, fewer than 5 remain available to borrow. That is near the floor of the past 12 months, and the history shows the pool was fully exhausted as recently as June 8, when availability briefly hit 1.1%. The cost to borrow doubled in a single session on June 9 to 2.25%, a level more than twice where it traded through most of May, and up 109% over the past month. New short positions are getting progressively more expensive to establish, even as shorts keep building.
Those shorts are building at a notable pace. Estimated short shares jumped roughly 12% on the week to around 25.6 million — the sharpest single-week move in the 30-day window tracked here. The ORTEX short score ticked up to 63.2 on June 9 from 61.2 the prior week, with the short score percentile ranking in the bottom decile of the universe, a sign that bearish positioning has become a defining feature of the name. Availability ranked in just the 3rd percentile. Options positioning, however, pulls in the opposite direction: the put/call ratio has dropped to 0.54, the lowest reading of the past year and nearly two standard deviations below its 20-day mean of 0.62. That disconnect is worth flagging — options traders are chasing calls into the weakness, while the lending market shows no sign of bearish demand letting up.
The Street reflects similar division. Analyst targets have been cut repeatedly in recent weeks. HSBC trimmed its target to $15.60 on June 10, maintaining a Hold. Barclays cut sharply from $18 to $14 on May 29, keeping Equal-Weight. Macquarie moved in the other direction, upgrading to Neutral from Underperform on the same day without attaching a new target — suggesting the worst of the downgrade cycle may be passing even if conviction remains low. JP Morgan holds an Underweight with a $15.50 target, established in March. The mean analyst target across the broader coverage universe is listed at $126, which is almost certainly a legacy figure reflecting ADR versus H-share confusion or stale data — it should not be read against the $14.11 ADR price. What is reliable: the recent direction of travel on targets is uniformly lower, and the analyst recommendation factor score ranks in just the 6th percentile. On valuation, the price-to-book has compressed to 1.33x, down roughly 22% in 30 days, and EV/EBITDA has been cut nearly in half over the same window to 2.15x. Forward earnings expectations have held up better — the EPS surprise factor scores in the 95th percentile, and the 12-month forward EPS growth factor ranks at 70.
The most recent earnings print, on May 28, left a mark. The stock fell 4.9% the day after results and was down 7.7% by the end of that five-day window. The prior quarter saw a similar pattern — a 5.2% one-day drop, then a 6.5% five-day loss. The next earnings date is pencilled in for August 27. Peer pressure has been equally brutal this week: NIO lost 12% on the week, XPEV fell 13.5%, making the sector-wide sell-off look broad rather than company-specific — though that offers limited comfort to holders.
With availability barely above zero and borrow costs rising, the focus next turns to whether short interest continues its climb into earnings season, or whether the call-heavy options positioning signals a faction of traders positioning for a mean-reversion trade against the crowded bear setup.
See the live data behind this article on ORTEX.
Open LI 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.
