Fox Corporation enters July with a sharp split between what shorts did last month and what options traders are signalling right now.
Short interest at FOXA is genuinely elevated — 14.3% of the free float, a level that warrants attention. But the direction has flipped. Over the past month, short positions climbed roughly 12%, pushing through the mid-June peak near 31.8 million shares. Then the week turned. Shorts trimmed 3.5% in five sessions, pulling back to 29.8 million shares as the stock recovered 6.9% to close at $52.16. The lending market tells the same story in calmer tones: availability is ample at 285%, well above the year's tightest reading of 258%, and borrowing costs remain negligible at 0.55%. This is not a forced-covering dynamic — there is no squeeze pressure here. Shorts are pulling back on choice, not necessity.
Options traders have already moved further and faster in the bullish direction. The put/call ratio has collapsed to 0.36, more than a full standard deviation below its 20-day average of 0.81 — a dramatic contrast with the heavy defensive positioning that ran from late May through mid-June, when the ratio spent weeks clustered above 1.20. That earlier defensive posture coincided with the stock's worst month in recent memory: FOXA fell 18% over June. Now, with the stock bouncing, options activity has swung decisively toward calls. The PCR is near its 52-week low of 0.20, meaning this week's reading represents the most call-heavy options positioning of the past year.
The Street is catching up. Wolfe Research upgraded FOXA to Outperform with a $71 target on July 1st — a clean break from their prior neutral-equivalent Peer Perform stance, and the most recent catalyst for the single-day 3.5% gain. The broader analyst picture remains cautious but constructive: eight buys against seven holds, with a mean target of $71.38 against a current price of $52.16. That gap implies roughly 37% upside to consensus, which is unusually wide. Barclays trimmed their target to $60 from $67 in mid-June — one of the few moves in the other direction. The valuation backdrop is undemanding: the stock trades at roughly 9.4x earnings and 6.2x EV/EBITDA, and the analyst recommendation divergence factor ranks in the 94th percentile, meaning Fox screens as more under-recommended relative to its fundamentals than almost any name in the universe. The ORTEX short score, while still elevated at 65.5, has been easing for two weeks from a June 17th peak near 69.2.
The bull-bear debate on Fox is structural rather than cyclical. Bulls point to profitable live news and sports inventory, a lean streaming cost base compared to diversified media peers, and improving forward EPS estimates — the 12-month forward EPS growth factor ranks in the 82nd percentile. Bears focus on cord-cutting pressure, linear TV advertising secular headwinds, and the asymmetric dependence on a handful of live sports rights deals. The stock's 18% drawdown through June reflected those concerns pricing in aggressively; the partial recovery this week reflects the market reassessing whether that selloff overshot. Close peer NWSA — News Corp, also Murdoch-controlled — fell 0.6% on the week while FOXA gained nearly 7%, highlighting a clear divergence in how the market is treating the two related names right now.
Earnings arrive on August 5th. The last two prints both produced positive single-day moves — 5.1% in May and 8.0% in February — making the setup heading into Q4 results worth watching against the backdrop of a still-elevated short base and a PCR that has swung from maximum caution to near-maximum bullishness in a matter of days.
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