UniFirst heads into July with a notable split in its positioning signals — shorts are rebuilding sharply while the borrow market remains among the loosest in the sector.
The most striking development this week is in options. Put/call positioning has turned meaningfully more defensive than usual, with the PCR running at 2.11 — well above its 20-day average of 1.57 and roughly 1.4 standard deviations elevated. That shift is abrupt: as recently as late May the ratio was below 0.90, and it has nearly doubled over the past month. Options traders have loaded up on downside protection at a pace that stands out even given UniFirst's generally cautious tone heading into its next earnings event, currently pencilled in for October 21.
Short interest tells a complementary story, though the borrow market itself is not under stress. Shorts covering 3.6% of the free float represent a 17.6% week-on-week jump — the sharpest single-week move in the trailing 30-day window. Most of that rebuild landed June 24, when estimated short shares jumped from around 443,000 to 526,000. Despite the positional shift, the lending market is extremely loose: availability runs near 6,000% — meaning shares available to borrow outnumber those already borrowed by roughly sixty to one — and cost to borrow, while up 44% on the week to 0.52%, remains trivially cheap in absolute terms. Shorts face no squeeze pressure and can add freely. The ORTEX short score of 34.5, while ticking up modestly from 32.8 ten days ago, reflects this benign borrow backdrop rather than an extreme positioning read.
The Street reflects a stock that has re-rated sharply higher over the past year but still carries a cautious consensus. Both UBS (Neutral, $260 target) and Barclays (Equal-Weight, $280) moved their targets materially higher in the first quarter — Barclays upgraded outright from Underweight in early March — yet neither converted that optimism into a bullish rating. JP Morgan reinstated coverage at Underweight with a $175 target in mid-2025, though that target looks significantly stale relative to the current $264.46 price and is likely to be revised. The mean target across all active coverage is $271.67, implying only modest upside from current levels. Valuation is not particularly cheap: the trailing PE sits near 35x and EV/EBITDA at 13.6x, both drifting lower over the past month as the stock has shed 0.4% since early June while earnings estimates edge higher. Factor scores are unremarkable — EPS momentum and surprise both mid-range, with the most interesting outlier being a perfect 100th-percentile dividend score, though the dividend history in the data predates 2023 and should be treated as stale context.
Institutional ownership is concentrated at the top end, with BlackRock holding 11.8% and a cluster of Vanguard vehicles together owning roughly 8%. T. Rowe Price added 193,000 shares in Q1 and Citigroup built a new 155,000-share position in the same period — two meaningful additions that suggest some institutional demand at levels meaningfully below current prices. Insider activity has dried up since February, and the most recent trades on record are all sells from EVP-level executives, though those transactions were modest in scale and occurred when the stock was trading near $200–240.
The most recent earnings print — Q3 reported on July 1 — landed with a 1.8% one-day gain and a 2.7% five-day gain. The note from last week flags that Q3 came in ahead of expectations with expanding operating margins, but management called out rising labor and logistics costs heading into 2027. With the next formal earnings date not until October, the near-term watch points are whether the sharp put-call shift and short rebuild of the past week reflect a specific catalyst or simply repositioning after the Q3 beat — and whether analyst targets catch up to a stock trading $90 above where JP Morgan's reinstated coverage sat a year ago.
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