LZB heads into its June 17 earnings release with options traders the most defensively positioned they have been in nearly a year — while the rest of the market is pointing the other way.
The options signal is the standout. The put/call ratio jumped to 1.18 on June 16, more than four standard deviations above its 20-day average of 0.58. That is the largest single-session spike in defensive positioning recorded in the past year and coincides almost exactly with the earnings date. Put buyers are paying up for downside protection at a level the stock has rarely seen — the 52-week high sits at only 1.38, meaning yesterday's reading approached the most extreme bearish options positioning of the past year in a single move. The timing is hard to ignore: the put surge arrived the day before the print, not during a broader market selloff.
Price action reinforces the caution. LZB fell 7.2% on June 16 alone, extending a 6.1% slide on the week to close at $35.06. Crucially, that move diverges sharply from correlated peers: MHK gained 3.5% on the day, SGI added 2.8%, and rose 1.6%. The stock is not caught in a sector-wide selloff — something stock-specific drove the selling. The one prior earnings reaction in the dataset, from February 2026, saw LZB fall 4.0% on the day and 5.3% over the following five sessions, establishing a bearish post-earnings baseline.
Short interest tells a considerably less alarming story. At 3.7% of the free float, the short position is meaningful but not extreme, and it has fallen around 5% over the past week — shorts were actually covering ahead of the print, not piling in. Borrow conditions are entirely loose: availability is running at roughly 1,020% of outstanding short interest, meaning there are more than ten shares available to borrow for every one currently borrowed, and the cost to borrow is a negligible 0.51%. The lending market offers no corroboration for the alarm visible in options.
On the analyst side, coverage of LZB is thin. The lone buy rating comes from Sidoti & Co., which upgraded the stock in November 2025 with a $39 target — now sitting 11% above the current price. That single voice of optimism rests on La-Z-Boy's brand positioning and the eventual recovery in consumer furniture spending, while bears, reflected in the options buying and recent selling pressure, see a cyclical business fighting persistent consumer caution, softening furniture demand, and margin compression from elevated retail inventories. The earnings report will test whether management's numbers give any ground to either camp.
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