ePlus heads into September with an unusual combination: a stock down 6% over the past month, short interest quietly building, and a sudden — if still modest — spike in borrowing costs that is worth watching.
The most striking data point this week is in the lending market. Borrowing costs have tripled. The cost to borrow has jumped to 1.10% from 0.38% a week ago — a 193% rise in seven days — after trading in an extremely tight band around 0.38–0.50% for the prior six weeks. That said, context matters: 1.10% is still cheap in absolute terms, and borrow availability remains enormous at over 1,700% of short interest, meaning there is no shortage of shares to lend. The spike looks more like a sudden burst of demand than the start of a structural squeeze.
Short interest tells a consistent but not alarming story. At 5.3% of the free float, it has risen roughly 5.5% on the week and about 5% over the past month, putting it at its highest level in the 30-day window. The move is steady rather than dramatic — shorts have been adding incrementally since mid-August, with a brief spike to 1.63 million shares on August 25 before pulling back. Days-to-cover of 5.2 days (per the latest FINRA fortnightly print) means an unwind would not be frictionless. Options positioning has edged more call-skewed recently: the put/call ratio is 0.33, above its 20-day average of 0.32 but not by enough to read as genuine defensiveness. The z-score of 1.6 puts it in elevated-but-normal territory.
On the Street, the picture is thin and dated. The most recent analyst action on record — a Stifel Hold reiteration with a target raised to $90 — was filed in May 2024, now well over two years old. The consensus mean target of $111 implies meaningful upside from the current $86.58 print, but it should be treated with caution given how stale the underlying data is. Valuation multiples from available data show a PE around 9.5 and EV/EBITDA near 6.8 — undemanding for a technology distributor — and an earnings yield of around 10.5%. The ORTEX short score is running at a mid-range 45, down from a brief peak near 49 on August 25, suggesting no extreme positioning signal in either direction.
Institutional ownership is concentrated and broadly stable. BlackRock holds roughly 15.7% and has been a net buyer, adding around 57,000 shares through July. Dimensional Fund Advisors crossed the 5% threshold in a July 14 filing, now at 5.2%. River Road Asset Management, a notable active holder, has slipped below 5% in its latest August 7 filing — a quiet but worth-monitoring reduction from a previously larger stake. All 13D/G positions on record are passive Schedule 13G filers; there is no activist on the register.
On the insider front, the CFO and COO both sold shares on July 29 — a combined $450,000 in proceeds — though every transaction was executed under pre-arranged 10b5-1 plans. Scheduled sales carry far less informational weight than discretionary ones, and the net 90-day insider position is modestly negative at around -$456,000. The next earnings date is flagged for November 6. The most recent print, in early August, saw the stock fall 5.3% the following day and drop a further 6.2% over the subsequent five sessions. The print before that produced a muted 1% gain followed by a similar five-day selloff.
The CTB spike is the one thread worth pulling on — whether it reflects a sudden burst of fresh shorting demand or simply a transient dislocation in the lending pool will become clearer as availability data evolves through the week ahead.
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