NWL heads into the final week of June with one of the more conflicted setups in the consumer space: a stock that has nearly doubled off its April lows yet carries growing short interest and a Street consensus that still sits firmly in hold territory.
The most striking tension right now is between price and positioning. NWL has climbed 40.7% over the past month, closing at $5.12 on Tuesday — yet short sellers have been adding, not covering. Short interest now sits at 10.8% of free float, up 17.8% over the same month. That is not the behaviour of a short base that believes the rally. Shorts added roughly 1.7 million shares in the most recent week alone, pushing the float-adjusted figure to its highest level in the 30-day window tracked here.
The borrow market, however, does not corroborate that bearish conviction. Availability is extraordinarily loose — roughly 1,144% relative to current short interest, meaning there are more than eleven shares available to lend for every one already borrowed. That is well above the 52-week floor of 268% and close to the upper end of the annual range. Cost to borrow has drifted down 14.9% over the past month to just 0.37%, close to its floor for the period. Together, those readings say the lending market sees no squeeze risk whatsoever; shorts face neither scarcity nor meaningful carry cost. The short score of 55.1 — edging higher every session this week from 53.2 a fortnight ago — reflects a slow but consistent drift toward elevated short pressure, rather than a sudden spike.
Options positioning tells the opposite story to the short book, and the contrast matters. Call demand has surged relative to puts — the put/call ratio has collapsed to 0.27, more than two standard deviations below its 20-day average of 0.46 and close to the 52-week low of 0.26. This is the most bullish options skew NWL has seen all year. The stock's best post-earnings day on record came in early May, when it jumped 13% on the day and held most of that gain over the following week. With the next earnings event on July 27, options traders appear to be positioning for a repeat rather than fading the move.
The Street itself remains cautious, and the most recent analyst action cuts against the rally. Morgan Stanley downgraded NWL to Underweight on May 20, cutting its target to $3.50 — well below the current $5.12 price. The broader consensus is five holds and one sell, with a mean target of $4.94, which implies the stock has already exceeded what most analysts think it's worth. Canaccord is the lone bull with a $9.00 target. The bear case rests on real deteriorating fundamentals: Q2 core sales fell 4.8% and the Outdoor and Recreation segment dropped 10.9%. The bull case leans on tariff-sourcing wins with over 30 customers and a Coleman brand recovery in Japan. On valuation, the P/E has expanded nearly two points over the past 30 days to roughly 8x, and the P/B has risen to 0.82x — the stock is no longer quite as cheap as it was. The forward earnings growth factor score of 93rd percentile is the one genuine bright spot in the factor deck; the short score rank of 13th percentile flags meaningful short pressure relative to the universe.
On the ownership side, Vanguard Portfolio Management reported a new position of 22.8 million shares as of March 31, and AQR added 6.3 million shares in the same period. Marshall Wace built a position of 6.5 million shares from near zero — a notable active-manager accumulation at a time when the stock was trading in the $3–4 range. On the other side, the CFO sold roughly $352,000 worth of shares in mid-May at $3.84, and the Chief Administration Officer sold $360,000 at $3.60 on May 22. Those are not enormous in absolute terms, but they represent the senior team taking money off the table at prices well below today's close — a pattern worth noting as the stock trades at a fresh multi-month high.
What to watch into the July 27 earnings print is whether the short base — still building quietly despite the rally — begins to cover as the stock pushes further above the mean analyst target, or whether deteriorating sales data from Q2 gives those shorts the fundamental anchor they have been waiting for.
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