VFS heads into its June 26 earnings with short sellers rebuilding positions, borrow availability tightening sharply, and the stock down 10% on the week — a setup that makes the lending market the most interesting signal right now.
The clearest story is in the borrow market. Availability has dropped to 30.7%, roughly half the level it was just a week ago when it sat near 54%. That move — a 44% tightening in availability in seven days — is notable on its own. Factor in that the 52-week low for availability was near 0%, and the direction of travel looks charged. Cost to borrow has held stubbornly above 10% for most of the past month, edging up around 2% week-on-week to 10.25%. That is not a cheap short to maintain. Short interest is a small absolute number — just 0.1% of the free float — so this is not a crowded short in the conventional sense. But the pace of rebuilding is worth watching: shares short jumped 22% week-on-week, adding roughly 320,000 shares in a single session on June 9 alone. The ORTEX short score has climbed to 62.8, its highest reading in the recent history, up from 59.8 a week ago. Availability is tightening, short sellers are adding, and borrowing costs are elevated — the setup has become meaningfully more active even if the absolute level of short interest remains modest.
Options positioning is calm by contrast. The put/call ratio sits at 0.53, barely above its 20-day average of 0.50 and well within one standard deviation of normal. That is far from the defensive extreme the 52-week high of 3.13 represents. Options traders are not hedging aggressively here — which makes the divergence with the borrow market an interesting read. Bears are expressing their view through the lending market rather than the options market.
The Street remains formally bullish, but cracks are appearing. Cantor Fitzgerald trimmed its target from $6.00 to $5.00 on June 9 while keeping its Overweight rating — a signal that conviction is softening. Wedbush's Dan Ives reiterated Outperform with a $6.00 target the following day, holding the line. With the stock at $3.04, the mean target of $6.23 implies more than 100% upside on paper, but only two buy-rated analysts cover the name, which limits the weight that consensus carries. The bull case rests on rising delivery volumes, migration to a new EV architecture, and gross margin improvement through scale. The bear case is that profitability remains out of reach until at least 2027 and execution risk in international markets is high. Valuation multiples are negative across the board — PE is −2.32, EV/EBITDA is −8.41 — which reflects a company still burning cash at scale. The EPS surprise factor scores in the 100th percentile, suggesting the company has a history of beating lowered expectations, but the 30-day EPS momentum rank of just 21 points to deteriorating near-term estimate revisions.
Ownership is almost entirely concentrated. Vingroup holds 83.5% of shares and founder Pham Nhat Vuong holds another 14.3%. That leaves a thin public float, which goes some way toward explaining why the borrow market tightens so quickly and why availability can drop from 75% to near zero in a matter of weeks, as it did in early 2026. The most recent earnings event on June 8 saw the stock fall 5.3% on the day. The May 27 event brought a 0.8% decline on the day followed by a further 5.8% drop over five sessions. Among correlated peers, SEHK-listed 1958 fell 13% on the week and 9863 shed 10% — both moving in close sympathy with VFS in what has been a rough stretch for Asian EV names broadly.
With a formal earnings date of June 26 now confirmed, the next two weeks will test whether the fresh short-selling activity and tightening borrow market reflect genuine fundamental concern or simply tactical positioning ahead of a volatile catalyst.
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