Uber sold 67.5 million Aurora shares at $7.10 on June 2. The stock was trading above that price before the block hit. It hasn't recovered to that level since, sitting at $6.79 as of today after another 4.1% down day. The irony is thick: the company that was supposed to validate autonomous trucking as a commercial reality just spent a month being the ceiling. That's the tension worth sitting with.
Aurora Innovation builds the Aurora Driver, a full-stack autonomous driving system designed for commercial trucking. This is not a software company in the traditional sense - it's a deep-tech bet that self-driving freight becomes infrastructure. The business is pre-revenue in any meaningful sense, which explains why price-to-sales comes in at 3,635x. Yes, that number is real, and yes, it does require a particular kind of conviction to own this.
Here's the contradiction the data is throwing off. The options market has a put/call ratio of 0.66 and a call-to-put open interest skew that is almost comical: 373,190 calls sitting against 64,409 puts. That's not a market hedging downside - that's a market paying up for upside. Net premium flow came in at $8,495 on the call side versus $2,586 on puts. Meanwhile the stock just closed below the $7.10 level where Uber unloaded a nine-figure block sale. Someone is wrong, and it's either the options crowd or the sellers following Uber out the door. The technical structure lends some credibility to the bulls. The SMA20 is $6.38, the SMA50 is $6.58, and price is currently above both. The regime reads UPTREND. RSI at 64.7 is elevated but not overbought. The chart says the trend is up even as the news flow says Uber was heading for the exit. Then there's the short side. 13.4% of the float is short with 5.03 days to cover. That's not a crowded short by extreme standards, but it's enough fuel for a squeeze if the stock clears resistance at $7.66 and forces covers. The max gamma strike at $10.00 tells you where the options market is anchoring its upside imagination.
Aurora fell to $6.16 on June 9 as Uber's block sale hangover spread. It has since clawed back to $6.79, which means the last month has been a recovery story quietly playing out beneath the noise. The Uber overhang is real, but it's also known and partially priced. What the market hasn't fully resolved is whether that sale was Uber trimming a position or Uber signaling something about the commercial timeline. The stock reacting to the block at $7.10 and now trading below it is the market's provisional answer. It may not be the final one.
The next hard date is July 29, when Aurora reports earnings for the quarter ending June 30. The street is modeling -$0.12 EPS. The expected move is 13.5%, which at current price implies roughly a dollar in either direction. That's not a small event for a stock at $6.79. Any update on commercial deployment progress or partnership announcements before then could move the needle faster than the chart alone would suggest.
A $14.5 billion market cap for a company with essentially no revenue and an operating margin of -23,350% is an act of faith, not arithmetic. The price-to-book at 7.36 and the negative PE of -16.9 are the least alarming numbers in the fundamental table, which is saying something. The 0.45 volume ratio suggests the current tape is thin and conviction is low. Low-conviction uptrends have a way of becoming high-conviction downtrends when the next headline lands wrong. And with zero social chatter in the last 24 hours, this is not a story with a crowd behind it right now.
$5.69 is the line in the data. Below that level, the uptrend thesis is structurally broken and the Uber block sale re-reads as smart money getting out, not an awkward overhang. Support sits at $5.81, so the two numbers are close together. A close below $5.69 changes the story entirely.
The setup here is a recovering uptrend, bullish options positioning, a meaningful short float, and a real catalyst on July 29. The fundamental case requires patience that most traders don't have and a belief that autonomous trucking commercial timelines don't slip again. The Uber block sale is the scar, and $7.10 is the level the market needs to reclaim to prove it's healed. Watch $7.66.