Boston Beer heads into its July 23 earnings print with an unusual tension: shorts have been cutting exposure at the same time Goldman Sachs just turned more negative on the stock.
Goldman's Bonnie Herzog lowered her price target this morning from $192 to $169 — below the current $183.16 price — while holding a Sell rating. That makes Goldman an outlier. The broader analyst community has spent the last two months trimming targets after April's weak quarter, but still sees meaningful upside: the Street consensus target averages $229, implying around 25% above where the stock trades now. Morgan Stanley, Bernstein, Citi, UBS, and RBC all cut targets in early May following Q1 results, but none went outright bearish. The bull case rests on margin recovery — Q1 gross margin hit 48.3%, its highest in five years — and a potential reacceleration in Twisted Tea. The bear case is that elevated ad spend and lingering production prepayments will cap earnings even if revenue stabilizes. Goldman is essentially betting the margin story won't deliver before the multiple re-rates lower.
Short positioning tells a less straightforward story. At 19.6% of free float, SAM carries genuinely elevated short interest — that's a meaningful overhang. Yet the direction of travel this week has been short-covering: SI is down about 4.7% on the week and has pulled back from a recent peak near 1.73 million shares early in July. What's notable is the borrow market shows no stress whatsoever. Cost to borrow is running at just 0.44%, near multi-month lows, and has eased around 8% on the week. Availability is wide open at 474%, compared to a 52-week low of just 263% — there is no shortage of shares to lend. That combination — high absolute SI but loosening borrow conditions and active covering — points to shorts managing down exposure rather than doubling up ahead of the print.
Options tell a similar decompression story. The put/call ratio has drifted down to 1.89, below its 20-day average of 2.16, and roughly three-quarters of a standard deviation below that mean. For context, the PCR touched above 3.0 as recently as late May — when the stock was under heavier pressure — and has been falling steadily since. Traders are still net-defensive relative to most equities (a PCR above 1.5 is not neutral), but the direction of movement is away from peak pessimism, not toward it. The ORTEX short score has followed suit, dropping from above 67 last week to 60.5 today — a meaningful five-point decline in a week that reflects the combined easing in SI and options skew.
The ownership backdrop adds useful context. C. Koch holds just over 22% of shares with no reported change in the most recent filing, providing a stable controlling anchor. BlackRock added meaningfully — 202,000 shares — through to the end of June, lifting its stake to 7.6%. Vanguard entities together hold roughly 9.6% and appear to have been building positions in Q1. On the institutional side, AQR and Quantinno both added aggressively in Q1, suggesting quantitative strategies have been accumulating. Insider trades on record are all from late February, with several C-suite executives selling modest amounts at $226 — well above where the stock sits now — which is stale enough to be of limited interpretive value.
The earnings history is worth flagging plainly. Q1 results, released April 30, sent the stock down 9.4% in a single session and 14.2% over the following week. That's the most recent data point, and it was a hard miss. The July 23 print is therefore the near-term focal point: whether the gross margin expansion story holds, whether Twisted Tea volumes show any reacceleration, and whether Goldman's freshly cut $169 target proves closer to reality than the $229 Street consensus.
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