OPTU heads into July with a stock that has more than doubled in a month yet faces a lending market tightening at a pace that demands attention.
The most striking development this week is how quickly borrow availability has collapsed. Six weeks ago, availability ran above 800% — plenty of shares for any short seller who wanted them. It has since fallen to 153%, a drop of more than 50% in a single week. That is still technically in the "tight" range rather than the extreme zone, but the trajectory is the story: availability has compressed by roughly five-fold since late May as short interest climbed 24% over the same period to 13.1% of the free float. The ORTEX short score has responded in kind, rising from around 60 to 67.7 over the past week — the highest reading in the available window. Cost to borrow tells a slightly different story. After spiking to 4.5% mid-week, it pulled back sharply to 1.25% by Tuesday — suggesting lenders repriced briefly, then eased as demand softened at the margin. Short sellers are not yet paying a punishing premium, but the direction of travel in availability points to a lending market that is getting harder to access.
The options market is less agitated. The put/call ratio has drifted back below its 20-day average of 1.09 to sit near 0.98, roughly half a standard deviation below the mean — a mild shift toward calls relative to recent norms. Earlier in June, when the PCR briefly touched 1.49, options traders were explicitly hedging. That defensiveness has eased as the stock rallied. The tension between a tightening borrow market and a more relaxed options posture is genuine: shorts are becoming harder to establish while the options crowd has grown slightly less cautious.
The Street's read is unambiguously negative. Every analyst move on record has been a cut. Citigroup downgraded to Sell in mid-May with a $0.50 target. UBS and Barclays both trimmed to $1.00. Those figures are broadly consistent with the current $1.45 price, so the data is internally coherent — the consensus is not saying the stock is cheap, it is saying it is fairly valued at best in a deteriorating operating environment. Valuation supports that caution: the EV/EBITDA multiple has barely budged over 30 days at 8.3x while the P/E and P/B remain deeply negative, reflecting a company generating losses against eroding book value. The one genuine bright spot in the factor scores is EPS surprise, which ranks in the 100th percentile — the company has consistently beaten low expectations. Everything else sits at or below median.
Insider activity adds a consistent thread. The General Counsel has sold 20,000 shares in each of the past three months at prices between $1.12 and $1.59. The February cluster was more significant — the CEO, CFO, General Counsel, and Chief Accounting Officer all sold on the same day. The trades are small in dollar terms and low in significance scores, but the pattern of steady selling from multiple insiders across several months is worth noting alongside the analyst downgrades.
Among the most correlated US peers, NCMI gained 9.2% on the week — broadly in line with OPTU's 7.4% move. MNTN added 9.0%. The shared momentum across these names suggests the week's gains reflected sector or risk-on rotation rather than a company-specific catalyst.
The next scheduled catalyst is the Q2 earnings print on August 6. The most recent earnings event, in early June, produced a one-day move of +13.6%. The prior event in May swung -18% on day one and extended to -36% over five days. With availability tightening and the short score at a local high, how the borrow market evolves in the weeks ahead of that print is the variable worth tracking.
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