GRPN has now gained 73% over the past month and another 19% this week, closing at $27.95, yet the borrow market has tightened sharply again — and the short base remains far too large for bears to exit cleanly.
The directional shift flagged in last week's note has continued, but availability has moved back the wrong way for shorts. Short interest edged lower again, falling roughly 4% on the week to 28.8% of free float — a genuine, if gradual, unwind from the 31%+ readings of early July. The FINRA fortnightly confirms about 12.0 million shares short, with days-to-cover still running at 6.1 days. That mechanical constraint is the core of the story: bears cannot cover quickly. Availability has swung violently. It briefly recovered to 13.8% mid-week, but by Monday it had collapsed back to 2.5% — meaning fewer than three shares remain available to borrow for every hundred already lent out. That is close to the 52-week tightest reading of 0.51%. Cost to borrow has moved in the same direction, jumping 92% from Thursday's 1.36% to 2.61% on Monday, its highest level in roughly a month. The borrow market is tight again, and getting tighter as the stock climbs.
Options positioning has turned decisively bullish, which is the clearest contrast with the short positioning data. The put/call ratio of 0.357 is now close to the lowest reading of the past year — the 52-week floor is 0.351 — and sits slightly below its 20-day average. That puts options traders almost exactly where they were a week ago, consistently expressing minimal demand for downside protection even as the stock runs. The ORTEX short score, which aggregates the lending-market and short-interest signals, has held in a tight band around 75.8 all week — extremely elevated, but no longer climbing as it was in early July. That plateau suggests the squeeze mechanics are mature rather than accelerating.
The Street picture is sharply divided, and the analyst data here carries a meaningful caveat: the most recent change — Goldman Sachs raising its Sell target from $10 to $13 in May — now looks deeply stale given the stock is trading at $27.95. Bulls at Northland Capital and Roth have price targets in the $44–$47 range, though those were set in mid-2025 and reflect a different entry point. The concentration of ownership adds another layer to the story. Pale Fire Capital holds 26.8% of shares and has not moved its position recently, while CEO Dusan Senkypl — the second-largest named individual holder at 7.5% — sold 1.35 million shares at $16.54 on June 11, a sale worth $22.3 million. That sale, at a price roughly 40% below the current level, represents one of the more striking insider data points in the dataset: the CEO monetised heavily at a level the market has since blown through. Continental General and Windward Management both added shares in Q1, and BlackRock added 223,000 shares through June 30, but the dominant ownership story remains the CEO sale at $16.54 against a stock now at $28.
Earnings provide the next hard catalyst. Results are due August 6. The two most recent prints each produced sharp one-day moves: a 12.2% gain after the May 7 release and a 9.1% jump after the May 8 update. Both moved further to the upside over the following five days. That is a consistent post-earnings pattern of positive momentum, though the base effect at $28 is very different from where those moves were recorded. With a 28.8% short float, 6.1 days-to-cover, and availability back near its floor, the August 6 print becomes a focal point for whether the remaining short base finally accelerates its exit — or finds fresh conviction on the fundamentals.
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