Hims & Hers Health heads into the week before its August 3 earnings with the short position still enormous but the acute squeeze pressure of late June clearly unwinding.
The lending market has shifted meaningfully since the last note. Availability has loosened from near-zero in early June — when the lending pool ran completely dry across multiple sessions — to roughly 20% now, the most accessible borrow has been since late May. Cost to borrow has fallen sharply in response, dropping 38% across the week to just 0.92%, its lowest level in over a month. Short interest itself is essentially unchanged, edging down less than 1% on the week to 29.1% of the free float — still 63.8 million shares, still one of the heaviest short positions in US healthcare services. What has changed is not the size of the bet but the ease of maintaining it. Shorts who needed to scramble for borrows in June are operating in a materially more comfortable environment now.
Options traders are not signalling particular anxiety. The put/call ratio is running at 0.57, barely above its 20-day average and well off the 52-week high near 1.52. That is a strikingly calm posture for a stock carrying nearly 30% short interest and reporting earnings in less than four weeks. Prior earnings have been volatile: the May print sent the stock down 11% on the day and 21% over the following week, while the June event saw a 3.5% drop followed by a 28% recovery over five sessions. The asymmetry in those outcomes — violent day-one drops, but occasional large recoveries — has not translated into elevated put demand this week.
The Street moved quickly to catch up with the stock after it rallied. On July 1, Canaccord raised its target to $40 and BofA lifted its Neutral target from $25 to $36 — the latter a 44% move that still stops short of an upgrade. Barclays had already lifted to $39 in mid-June. The consensus mean target now sits at $28.35, which is below the current price of $36.17, reflecting a mix of bulls clustered in the high $30s to $40 range and cautious neutrals anchoring the average lower. JPMorgan holds an Overweight with a $33 target — underwater to the current price — while Truist and Citi both sit at Hold. The valuation picture is stretched: the PE multiple has expanded by 31 points across 30 days, and price-to-book has risen nearly 1.5 turns in the same window. EPS momentum factors rank in the 1st percentile on both 30- and 90-day horizons, a sign that estimate revisions have not kept pace with the price move.
Insider activity has been consistently one-directional. The CFO sold twice in the past three weeks — roughly $880,000 combined — and the CMO, COO, and CTO all sold shares in mid-June across the $30-$35 range. Net insider activity over 90 days shows net buying in aggregate, but the aggregate is dominated by stock awards rather than open-market purchases. The open-market picture is pure distribution at the management level.
The setup heading into the August 3 print is one where the short thesis has not been abandoned — 29% of float short is unambiguous — but the cost and difficulty of maintaining that position have eased considerably. Whether the next catalyst, earnings, gives shorts a reason to press again or forces another short-covering scramble is the question the current data cannot answer. The divergence between calm options pricing and extreme short positioning is the tension worth tracking between now and August 3.
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