The one number
Joby has authority to sell $750 million of new stock into the open market at its own discretion, and almost nobody talking about the name this week has mentioned it.
The program is an at-the-market equity facility, filed with the SEC on 11 August 2026 with Morgan Stanley, J.P. Morgan, Allen & Company and BofA Securities as sales agents. Against the 989,124,237 shares the company reported outstanding on 30 June, $750 million works out to roughly 12% of the share count at today's price. No announcement is required when the company uses it, and the filing was made after the second-quarter report, so nothing published so far says whether a single share has been sold.
That is the cleanest explanation available for why good news keeps arriving and the stock keeps not caring. It is also not proof of anything, and this review is not going to pretend otherwise.
Where it sits
At 6.13 the stock is below every moving average that matters: the 20-day at 6.51, the 50-day at 7.18, the 100-day at 8.46 and the 200-day at 9.85. It has not closed above its 50-day in 32 sessions. RSI sits at 35.8, which is weak without being washed out.
Against its own history, this is the low end of everything. Joby is down 53% year to date and 71% below the 20.95 all-time high set on 4 August 2025. On 16 September it traded at 5.93, the lowest price in a year, and closed that day at 6.08.
The line worth marking is 6.00. The last time Joby closed below it was 22 April 2025, 357 sessions ago. That statistic will stop being true the day it breaks, which is rather the point of writing it down now.
The weekly chart puts this zone in its real context. The $5.50-6.50 band has been traded in eleven separate visits since the end of 2021: twelve weeks of it from February to May 2025, and before that a run of twenty-five consecutive weeks from September 2023 to March 2024. Joby spent most of 2022 through mid-2025 in and around this zone. The $21 print was the anomaly, not this price.
Measured as a retracement, the October 2024 to August 2025 advance ran from 4.80 to 20.95, up 336% in forty weeks - and at $6 the stock has given back roughly 92% of it. It sits below the 78.6% level at 8.26, which lands almost exactly on the 100-day average, while the 61.8% at 10.97 sits just above the 200-day and the year's heaviest volume shelf at 9.21-10.14. Between here and about $9 there is comparatively little transacted stock. Above $9, there is a year's worth of people who paid more.
What the company has actually been doing
This is the part that makes the chart strange.
- 10 September - Joby began flying its electric air taxi in Texas under the federal eIPP programme, which is exactly what it told investors in August it would do in September.
- 10 September - its autonomous aircraft began a cross-country tour.
- 18 September - the company announced it had completed what it described as the first fully autonomous flight across the United States.
- 11 August - it acquired Resonant Sciences to scale its defence business.
- 22 July - it finalised its agreement with Virgin Atlantic for UK service.
- 30 June - it launched the first phase of a manufacturing alliance with Toyota.
In the second-quarter report on 5 August the company said it was in the fifth and final stage of FAA type certification and having its "strongest quarterly progress yet" there, with five aircraft flying and twelve more in production. It raised its full-year revenue outlook to $115-125 million.
The 52-week low was set on 16 September. The autonomous cross-country flight was announced on 18 September. The low came first.
The balance sheet is not the argument
Joby reported $2.3 billion in cash and short-term investments as of 30 June, and guided to using $385-415 million of it across the second half of 2026. That is roughly three years of runway at the pace it has guided to, before touching the $750 million facility at all.
So whatever is wrong here, it is not the company running out of money. It has permission to sell stock opportunistically, which is a different condition from needing to. Those two things get conflated constantly and they should not be.
The catch
Three of them.
The overhang is unquantified, not imaginary. The $750 million is authority, not activity. The next scheduled disclosure is the third-quarter filing, expected in early November. Until then anyone who tells you how much has been sold is guessing.
It is not simply a sector story. Archer Aviation, the nearest listed comparable, is higher over the last six months while Joby is down 26% over the same stretch. EHang is down 68% year to date, so dispersion inside this small group is wide and one peer is not a sector. But the easy explanation - that electric aviation is out of favour and Joby is being dragged along - does not survive contact with Archer's chart.
Beware the wrong filing. A prospectus filed on 11 September looks alarming on a filings screen and is not the story: it covers 2,419,801 shares, about a quarter of one percent, being resold by the former Blade business as earnout consideration. Joby receives no proceeds from it. It is not a capital raise.
One thing cuts the other way. Trading is getting quieter as the price falls: 20-day average volume is running about 30% below the 60-day, and across the last twenty sessions up days and down days have averaged almost the same volume. Forced selling usually announces itself with expanding, lopsided volume. That is not what this looks like. It looks like a slide, not a liquidation - which is a statement about the character of the decline, not a forecast of its end.
The question
The operating milestones arrived on schedule and the stock made a one-year low anyway. In early November the company files again and the market finally learns how much of that $750 million has gone out the door. Which of those two facts turns out to have mattered?