ANDE heads into Tuesday's Q2 earnings release with options traders unusually bullish and short sellers sitting well offside on a stock that has run hard this year.
The clearest positioning signal is in the options market — and it points firmly toward the upside. The put/call ratio has dropped to 0.32, nearly a full standard deviation below its 20-day average of 0.49. That is close to the most call-heavy reading of the past year, with the 52-week low at 0.12. The shift is sharp: through most of July, the PCR was running above 0.68, before collapsing after mid-month. Options traders appear to have flipped from cautious to confident in a matter of days. The stock itself is down 1.3% on Monday and 6.4% on the week, pulling back to $69.86 after a month that was still up 5.4% — so the call positioning is running against the immediate price weakness, not with it.
Short sellers are not the story here. With just 3.2% of the free float on loan and borrow availability at over 5,700% of outstanding short interest, there is no meaningful squeeze pressure and no bearish conviction in the lending market. Cost to borrow remains negligible at 0.46%. The short score of 35 — roughly the 49th percentile — is consistent with a stock that is simply not attracting aggressive bearish attention.
The analyst setup gives bulls room to work with. The mean price target of $81.67 implies roughly 17% upside from Monday's close. The most recent formal target adjustment came from Benchmark in early May, raising to $90 after the prior quarter's print, which itself delivered a 4.7% one-day gain and a 5.9% five-day move. That contrasts with the quarter before, which saw a 10.7% one-day drop and a 9.7% five-day decline — a reminder that Andersons prints can move sharply in either direction. EPS surprise ranks in the 84th percentile of the broader universe, and 90-day EPS momentum ranks in the 90th, suggesting the earnings trend has been strongly positive heading in.
The print will therefore test whether the company can sustain the operational momentum that drove the stock's year-to-date outperformance — and whether the bullish options repositioning of the past two weeks reflects genuine fundamental insight or simply a crowded call trade ahead of a historically volatile report.
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