IonQ arrives at its June 16 earnings report with the most dramatic short unwind of the past month still fresh — and a Street that cannot agree on what the stock is worth.
The positioning story has shifted more in the past week than in the prior month combined. Short interest fell nearly 22% in seven days to 15.9% of the free float — down from above 23% in mid-May and above 30% a month before that. More than 27 million shares have been returned since the borrow market was at its tightest. That tightness was extreme: availability dropped to near zero in late May, with fewer than one share available per 500 borrowed. It has since opened back to 19.2% — still tight, but the direction has clearly reversed. Cost to borrow has followed, easing to under 0.9% from above 1.7% a month ago. The ORTEX short score sits at 67.6, down from above 69 at the start of June, reflecting the unwinding pressure. Critically, the exit looks orderly rather than forced — shorts are choosing to reduce ahead of the print, not being squeezed out.
Options are not corroborating the shorts' anxiety. The put/call ratio is 1.07, almost exactly on top of its 20-day average of 1.07, with a z-score near zero. That is neutral by any measure, and stands in deliberate contrast to the lending market's recent drama. With the 52-week PCR range running from 0.75 to 1.42, the current reading places options traders squarely in the middle — neither pressing for downside protection nor loading up on calls ahead of Monday's release. The two signals are telling different stories: shorts are reducing risk, while options traders are not paying up to hedge.
The analyst picture is similarly split. Rosenblatt maintained its Buy with a $100 target as recently as June 11 — the most current read from a firm covering the name. JP Morgan sits on the opposite end, holding a Neutral with a $50 target raised from $42 in early May after the last earnings beat. Wedbush lifted its Outperform target to $75 from $60 around the same time. The mean target across coverage is $67.63, roughly 17% above the current price of $57.85, but the dispersion between Rosenblatt at $100 and JP Morgan at $50 reflects a genuine disagreement about the pace of quantum computing commercialisation. The bull case rests on a 334% revenue growth rate, a 256-qubit system in development, and the SkyWater Technologies acquisition expanding manufacturing capability. The bear case points to sustained losses, the risk of shareholder dilution, and the possibility that competing qubit architectures overtake trapped-ion technology before IonQ can scale. Valuation multiples — price-to-book at 4.7x, EV/EBITDA at -62x — are pre-revenue technology proxies rather than classical anchors, and the EPS surprise factor score of 2 out of 100 flags a history of missing estimates on the bottom line even when revenue impresses.
The earnings history in the data shows the last reported print produced a modest next-day decline of 0.7%, followed by a 15% five-day gain — suggesting the market's reaction window on IonQ tends to extend well beyond the initial close. Closest peer QUBT was roughly flat on the week while SMCI dropped 27% — a reminder that correlated hardware names can diverge sharply on idiosyncratic news.
The question going into Monday is whether the revenue trajectory — and any update on SkyWater integration or qubit roadmap milestones — is enough to hold the gains made by covering shorts, or whether the bears who exited simply find a lower re-entry point on the other side of the print.
See the live data behind this article on ORTEX.
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