Copart: Bulls and Bears Head Into September Earnings on a Collision Course

CPRT enters the week of August 15 with a 7.5% single-day pop behind it, a short book that never stopped growing through the rally, and an earnings date just three weeks away — a setup where the direction of travel for bulls and bears is unusually hard to reconcile.

The short position tells the most persistent story here. SI as a percentage of the free float has eased fractionally to 4.35% from a brief peak above 5% earlier in the week, but that modest pullback does not change the bigger picture: shorts have been adding continuously since mid-May, when the float percentage was closer to 3.7%. The borrow market offers no friction to that thesis — cost to borrow is a negligible 0.42%, up about 13% on the week but still well within the range of the past month, and availability is extraordinarily loose at over 5,000% of short interest. There is essentially no squeeze pressure in the lending market; anyone who wants to put on a short position faces no meaningful cost or constraint. The ORTEX short score of 39, largely unchanged across the past two weeks, confirms the short setup is moderate rather than extreme.

Options traders are telling a different story from the shorts. The put/call ratio has drifted down to 0.53, running nearly a full standard deviation below its 20-day average of 0.56 — call demand has been picking up relative to puts, suggesting at least some participants are positioning for further upside into September. That's a contrast worth noting: while the short book has grown steadily, the options market has tilted toward calls. The divergence doesn't resolve cleanly; it implies a market split between shorts leaning on the stock's inability to reclaim prior highs and options buyers chasing the recent momentum.

The Street adds another layer of tension. The consensus mean target of $40.30 sits roughly 27% above the current price of $31.61, which would ordinarily look constructive — but the dispersion is wide. Barclays lowered its target to $26 in late July, an Underweight call that now prices the stock below where it was trading at the trough. JP Morgan holds a Neutral at $34, barely above the current level. Baird's Outperform target at $48 represents the bullish anchor. The bull case rests on the 5.6% rise in global average selling prices, the growing share of international buyers (now 38% of auction units), and the platform advantages of VB3. Bears point to persistently weak unit volumes, which have been a drag through the past two quarters. The EPS momentum scores are genuinely strong — ranked in the 85th percentile on 30-day momentum and 84th on 90-day — but forward earnings growth, ranked only in the 36th percentile, suggests analysts don't expect that momentum to persist at the same pace.

Institutional flows offer a mildly positive read. BlackRock added 4.4 million shares through July, bringing its stake to 7.3% of the company. Geode and Capital Research both added meaningfully. On the insider side, the picture is less encouraging: CEO Jeffrey Liaw sold roughly $846k worth of stock on July 28 at $30.49, continuing a pattern of quarterly sales that has been consistent through the year. None of the recent insider activity carries high significance scores, and the sales appear to follow a programmatic schedule rather than signal a directional view — but the cumulative net selling of roughly $3 million over 90 days is a data point worth noting against a backdrop of a stock down nearly 20% year-to-date.

CPRT last reported in late May, when the stock rose 2.3% the following day. The prior print produced a 1.9% decline. Neither reaction was dramatic. With the September 3 report now close, the question is whether the combination of a recovering stock, a rebuilt short position, a divided analyst community, and call-side options activity creates a more charged setup than the muted reactions of recent quarters would suggest.