GRPN enters the week after a 40% rally still trading above $22 — but the short position that absorbed that move remains almost entirely intact, and borrow availability has eased only to levels history suggests are temporary.
The lending market tells the most revealing story right now. Availability has climbed to 13.1% — up sharply from the sub-1% levels that persisted through most of June — but that loosening mirrors almost exactly what happened on June 16, when availability briefly touched 11.9% before collapsing back to 0.97% within three trading days. The current reading is still very tight: only one share is available to borrow for every seven already on loan. Cost to borrow has risen 18% on the week to just under 2%, and is up 19% over the past month. The ORTEX short score is 76.4, barely off its recent high of 76.8 — placing short positioning in roughly the 96th percentile of names in the universe. This is not a borrow market that looks like it's opening up structurally. It looks like the same pattern completing another cycle.
Short interest itself reinforces that read. At 31.1% of the free float — 12.7 million shares — SI is essentially where it was when the previous two notes were filed. A 40% price move in a week produced a short increase of just 1.4%, not a covering wave. Shorts absorbed over $8 per share of mark-to-market pain and held. That behaviour — combined with an ORTEX days-to-cover of 8.3 per the latest FINRA settlement — points to conviction rather than inertia. Options positioning offers no counterweight: the put/call ratio is 0.39, near the annual low of 0.36, meaning options activity is skewed toward calls. That's not unusual for a name that has just squeezed 40%, but it also means there is no meaningful put-hedge buffer if the stock reverses.
The Street remains deeply divided, and the structure of that division is itself notable. Goldman Sachs carries a Sell with a $13 target — more than 40% below where the stock trades now — and raised that target from $10 in May. Bulls at Northland and Roth are working from targets of $44 and $47 respectively, framing the turnaround in terms of operational leverage and cash conversion. The mean consensus target of $26 sits only modestly above the current price, but that figure blends a $13 floor with $44–$47 ceilings, and neither extreme looks particularly anchored to where the stock is trading. Valuation multiples give some grounding: the P/E has compressed to 9.5x on a trailing basis, down over 2 points in the past month, while EV/EBITDA is running near 7.9x. Those numbers are not expensive for a company the bear case frames as a structurally declining business — but they require the turnaround narrative to hold.
The insider picture added a wrinkle that remains live. CEO Dusan Senkypl sold 1.35 million shares on June 11 at $16.54, a transaction worth $22.3 million. The stock is now 37% above that sale price. He remains the third-largest named holder on record. Whether that sale reads as opportunistic trimming or a more cautious signal about the trajectory is a question the data cannot answer — but it is the kind of trade that shorts will point to when the next loosening in availability gets absorbed.
Earnings are scheduled for August 6. The last two prints produced next-day moves of 9% and 12% respectively, both to the upside. With short interest still above 31% of float, borrow availability potentially snapping tight again, and options activity continuing to lean toward calls, the setup into that event — and how availability behaves between now and then — is where attention belongs next.
See the live data behind this article on ORTEX.
Open GRPN 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.
