GRPN has slipped another 3% on the week to $19.59 — and for the first time in months, short sellers are actually pulling back rather than pressing, though the borrow market remains far too tight to call this a genuine shift in sentiment.
The most notable development this week is short covering, not short building. Short interest fell 6.6% over the week to 30.7% of free float — down from 32.9% when the previous note was filed on August 18. In absolute terms, bears returned roughly 840,000 shares. That is a meaningful one-week move, and it marks the first sustained retreat after weeks of steady accumulation. The ORTEX short score eased slightly to 78.8, after holding near 79.1 for most of the prior week — still deep in bearish territory but no longer climbing. Availability, however, tells a more complicated story. It remains extremely tight at 8.9% — fewer than nine shares in the lending pool for every hundred already borrowed. That is up from last week's 7.4%, but still well below mid-August levels of 14.6%, and nowhere near loose. The 52-week low was 0.37%, hit on July 31, and the borrow market has been structurally stressed for months. Cost to borrow has risen 25% over the week to 2.82%, the highest level in recent weeks — lenders are starting to charge more even as shorts reduce positions, suggesting the available pool is shrinking faster than the short base.
Options positioning has turned notably more bullish, and that contrast with the still-elevated short base is the week's sharpest tension. The put/call ratio has dropped to 0.32 — almost exactly two standard deviations below its 20-day average of 0.38, and close to the 52-week low of 0.31. That is the most call-heavy the options market has been all year. It sits in stark contrast to a short interest reading that, even after this week's partial cover, still ranks in the bottom 2nd percentile of all stocks by short score. Whether options traders are hedging against a squeeze or genuinely turning constructive on the business is impossible to say — but the divergence between call demand and short positioning is unusual and worth watching.
The Street remains sharply divided, and recent analyst activity reinforces that split. Goldman Sachs has kept a Sell rating with a target of $13 — a level Goldman raised from $10 in May, but still 34% below the current price of $19.59. Bulls at Northland Capital and Roth Capital held targets in the $44–$47 range through mid-2025, though those reads are now more than a year stale and should not be taken as current guidance. The mean consensus target of around $30 implies meaningful upside from here, but that figure is heavily distorted by the gap between the Goldman bear case and older bull-side targets. The PE multiple has compressed materially — down roughly four turns over the past 30 days — reflecting the stock's 24% one-month decline. EV/EBITDA at around 10x remains the more stable read, and it has been drifting lower.
The institutional picture adds one layer worth noting. Millennium Management added over 1.1 million shares as of August 12, bringing their position to just over 5% of shares. Divisadero Street Capital also built a new position of 1.8 million shares through June. Those are active manager moves pointing in the opposite direction from Goldman's bearish rating. On the insider side, CEO Dusan Senkypl sold 1.35 million shares at $16.54 in June — a $22 million disposal that represents the largest insider transaction in the recent window and has not been offset by any subsequent buying.
The earnings calendar sets the next hard test: Q3 results are not due until November 6. The last two prints both produced single-day drops of around 8–8.5%, with five-day moves deteriorating further to losses of 14–19%. That pattern gives options traders with three months of runway plenty of reason to position now. With short covering finally beginning, availability still tight, cost to borrow rising, and options skewing sharply toward calls, the week's most important question is whether bears are genuinely reassessing the thesis — or simply taking profits ahead of the next leg.
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