The tension that defined OPFI earlier this week has sharpened further — the CEO is still buying every day, shorts keep adding, and now options traders have broken decisively from the cautious posture they held all summer.
The clearest shift this session is in options positioning. The put/call ratio has collapsed to 0.81, nearly three standard deviations below its 20-day average of 1.09 — the most call-skewed reading since mid-July. For context, the PCR ran consistently above 1.05 from late July through last week, reflecting persistent demand for downside protection after the August 10 earnings disaster. That defensive consensus has flipped. Call buyers are now outnumbering put buyers by the widest margin of recent months, a sharp contrast to the bearish options tone that accompanied the 30% earnings drop.
The borrow market tells a more adversarial story. Short interest climbed another 15.3% in a single session on August 25 to reach 13.0% of free float — a 33% rise over the past month. The cost to borrow has doubled in a week, hitting just over 1%, the highest level in the 30-day window, though still modest in absolute terms. More telling is what's happening to availability: it tightened from roughly 170% last week to 111% now, the lowest reading of the past year. The lending pool is not yet stressed, but it is shrinking quickly as fresh shorts pile in. That pace of tightening, from 337% in mid-August to 111% today, is a notable compression in just two weeks.
The Street remains constructive but has moved to trim expectations. Citizens' David Scharf reiterated his Market Outperform on August 26 — the same day he kept the target unchanged at $11 after cutting it from $15 on August 11. Stephens also lowered its target to $9.50 from $11 following the earnings print. Both analysts held their ratings, so the direction of travel is cautious rather than bearish: analysts still see roughly 55–72% upside to current levels from their respective targets, but the price-target downgrades reflect genuine concern about the quarter. The bull case centres on maintained full-year guidance ($650M–$675M revenue) and argues the volume miss reflects competitive dynamics rather than credit deterioration. Bears point to higher charge-offs, sluggish new product rollout, and the risk embedded in OppFi's fair value accounting approach. The ORTEX short score jumped to 66.8, its highest reading of the past two weeks and up from 61.1 on August 12, reinforcing that short-side pressure is building systematically rather than episodically.
Founder and Chairman/CEO Todd Schwartz continued his daily buying campaign through August 24. The cadence remains steady — roughly 3,500 shares per day in recent sessions — on top of the larger $420,000-plus blocks he deployed on August 12 and 13. Net insider buying over 90 days stands at approximately $2.26 million. The Schwartz family entity already controls 53% of shares through Schwartz Capital Group, so these are incremental additions to an already dominant position. Still, the consistency of the signal matters: the CEO is absorbing stock every session at prices between $7.00 and $7.20, directly into the teeth of rising short interest. Against that, close peers had a mixed week — NAVI gained 5.4% and DAVE rose 4.9%, while ATLC fell 3.7% and JCAP dropped 6.3% — leaving OPFI's 4.3% weekly gain looking respectable in relative terms.
The next scheduled catalyst is the Q3 print on November 9. Between now and then, the key variable to watch is whether the options market's abrupt pivot to calls proves durable, or whether it fades back toward the defensive posture that dominated from late July through mid-August — particularly as availability continues to tighten and shorts have shown no sign of retreating.
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