COUR heads into its June 23 earnings report with short sellers in clear retreat — yet the stock remains well below analyst targets, and options traders just turned more defensive.
Short interest has fallen sharply over the past month, dropping nearly 30% to around 12.4% of the free float. That remains a meaningful level, but the direction matters: bears have been covering steadily since mid-May, when SI peaked near 19% of float. Borrow conditions support that read — availability is loose at roughly 659%, meaning shares to borrow outnumber those already borrowed by more than six to one. Cost to borrow has doubled in the past week to just over 1%, but that absolute level is still modest. The lending market is not signaling a squeeze; it is signaling that short sellers are leaving rather than pressing.
Options positioning tells a more cautious story into the print. The put/call ratio jumped to 0.29 on June 22 — nearly 2.4 standard deviations above its 20-day average of 0.22. That is an abrupt shift from a market that had been unusually call-heavy for most of June. It suggests hedging demand picked up sharply in the final session before results. The stock itself closed at $5.31, down less than 1% on the day and roughly flat on the week, but off about 19% in 2026.
The bull and bear cases are in genuine tension. Bulls point to forward EPS estimates that have moved sharply higher year-on-year — a 96th-percentile reading on that factor — and a valuation picture that looks compressed: EV/EBITDA around 1.5x and price-to-book below 1.4x. Analysts who cover the stock are broadly constructive, with a consensus buy rating and a mean price target of $8.00 — roughly 50% above Friday's close. JP Morgan maintained Overweight after the last print while cutting its target to $8, and Needham held firm at Buy and $10. Goldman Sachs remains the outlier, maintaining a Sell with a $6 target. Bears focus on weak enterprise net retention, the ongoing Udemy merger integration risk, and fading post-pandemic enrollment momentum — all of which dragged the stock down 14.6% on the day of its last major earnings release in late April.
That April reaction looms large. A double-digit decline followed a result that the market clearly judged insufficient. Insight Holdings, a 10% owner, sold roughly $7.7 million of stock in mid-May — spread across multiple transactions around the $5.25 level — adding a layer of insider uncertainty ahead of the quarter. The earnings report will test whether the revenue trajectory and any update on the Udemy merger can shift the debate, or whether the enterprise segment deterioration that rattled investors in April has continued.
See the live data behind this article on ORTEX.
Open COUR on ORTEX →ORTEX Market Intelligence content is generated by AI from a snapshot of ORTEX's proprietary data. Content is informational only and does not constitute investment advice.
