GT enters the final week of June carrying an unusual tension: the stock is up 10.5% on the week to $6.84, yet short sellers are adding exposure at the fastest pace in months.
Short interest is the defining story this week, and the data pulls in two directions at once. Bears have rebuilt their position sharply — SI now stands at 13.6% of free float, up nearly 20% in a week and 14% in a single session on June 25 alone, the most aggressive one-day accumulation in the 30-day window. That puts shorts back near their heaviest positioning of the past month. Yet the borrow market tells a far calmer story. Cost to borrow remains negligible at 0.44%, barely changed on the week. Availability is loose at 321% — meaning roughly three shares remain available to borrow for every one already lent out, well above the 52-week floor of 299%. Bears are piling in, but they face zero friction doing so.
Options traders, by contrast, have turned meaningfully more bullish. The put/call ratio has dropped to 0.59, roughly one standard deviation below its 20-day average of 0.76 — the most call-heavy reading in weeks. The shift is dramatic: through most of May and into early June, the PCR was running above 0.90, reflecting deep scepticism. That hedging posture has now evaporated. The divergence between rising short interest and falling PCR is the central tension in GT's positioning right now — short sellers are rebuilding while options participants are leaning the other way.
The Street remains cautious overall, though the consensus is not uniformly negative. The most recent analyst action of note came from Deutsche Bank in mid-May, which downgraded GT to Hold from Buy and cut its target to $7 from $9 — flagging deteriorating fundamentals after the May earnings miss. JP Morgan held its Overweight rating at a $10 target, the lone bullish outlier among eight covering analysts, two of whom hold Buy ratings against six Holds. The mean target of $7.46 sits only modestly above the current price, implying limited upside even on the Street's central case. Valuation multiples add some nuance: the P/E has compressed 25 points over the past 30 days to 36.9x — an unusual reading for a company with a price-to-book of just 0.55x and an EV/EBITDA of 5.2x, suggesting earnings have been particularly thin. The ORTEX short score has climbed every session this week to 62.3, its highest reading of the tracked period, driven almost entirely by rising SI momentum. Factor scores confirm the split character: 30-day EPS momentum ranks in the 100th percentile, while the 90-day reading sits near the bottom of the universe.
The earnings reaction history warrants attention. GT's most recent print in early May produced a one-day decline of nearly 11% and a five-day drop of over 20%. The prior available reading showed a smaller one-day fall of 3.1% but a five-day loss of nearly 18%. Both reactions were to the downside, and both extended well beyond the initial session. The next earnings event is scheduled for August 5. With short sellers adding aggressively into a stock that has rallied 13% over the past month, the question heading into that date is whether the recent recovery has been driven by short covering or genuine re-rating — and whether the two-sided positioning of this week (shorts building, call buyers present) resolves before or after the print.
Peers offered limited support this week: LEA fell 2.1% and ADNT dropped 3.6%, while STRT and SMP gained around 3%. GT's 10.5% weekly gain is a clear outlier versus the auto-parts group, making the simultaneous rebuild in short interest all the more striking to watch.
See the live data behind this article on ORTEX.
Open GT 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.
