RDDT heads into September with short sellers still pressing their case — but a borrow market that refuses to tighten and a stock that has clawed back 1% on the week despite a brutal July earnings reaction.
Short interest has continued its one-way climb. Bears added another 0.7% to their position over the past week, bringing SI to 15.9% of the free float — roughly 21.9 million shares. On a monthly basis the move is more striking: SI is up 32% since early August, one of the most sustained bear-building episodes the stock has seen. The ORTEX short score has held in the low 60s all week, currently at 62.1, and while that is down from a peak of 64.3 on August 21, the direction of travel remains cautious-to-bearish. Yet this is where the positioning picture splits. Availability has tightened from a very loose 563% in mid-August to around 280% now — still comfortably in normal territory, meaning there are nearly three times as many shares still available to borrow as are already out on loan. Cost to borrow, despite jumping 73% week-on-week, remains a negligible 0.54%. Bears are building, but they are not paying a squeeze premium to do it.
Options sentiment tells a similarly composed story. The put/call ratio is running at 0.83, slightly below its 20-day average of 0.85 and about half a standard deviation under the norm — suggesting options traders are not aggressively hedging downside. The ratio has dropped noticeably from levels near 0.90 in early August, when defensive positioning was more pronounced. That shift is consistent with a market that has largely repriced the July earnings disappointment rather than one bracing for a fresh leg lower.
The Street's reaction to that July print was swift and largely uniform. Most analysts cut targets on July 31, with Morgan Stanley trimming to $210 from $240 as recently as August 21 — the most recent bellwether move in the data. JP Morgan went to $185 from $200 while holding Neutral. Wells Fargo made the most aggressive cut, dropping to $142 from $187, reflecting genuine concern about the Google dependency and ad budget competition. Against that, Truist raised its target to $275 and B. Riley went to $270, underscoring how polarised the bull-bear debate remains. The mean consensus target is $215, implying roughly 39% upside from the current $154 — a gap that reflects both the bull case on AI data licensing and human-first content, and deep uncertainty about whether Reddit can sustain traffic if Google's algorithm continues to shift. Bull-bear cases in the data are fresh (updated September 1) and the core tension is unchanged: Reddit's content moat is real, but so is the Google revenue cliff.
CEO Steve Huffman sold approximately $2.7 million in shares on August 31 under a pre-arranged 10b5-1 plan — a planned sale that carries less signal than a discretionary one, though the net insider picture over 90 days remains negative at roughly $24.5 million in net sales. Worth flagging separately: Huffman holds a Schedule 13D filing on the register, reflecting his role as a controlling insider rather than an external activist. The activist disclosure caveat applies — positions are as-last-disclosed and can change without a further filing below the 5% threshold. More interesting from an ownership angle is Tencent, whose last disclosed stake had fallen from 9.98% to 4.17% as of November 2025 filings; the position may have moved further since. Jericho Capital appears as a new holder, adding 3.3 million shares as of June 30.
On valuation, the EV/EBITDA multiple has compressed about 1.4 turns over the past 30 days to roughly 14.5x, and the P/E ratio has pulled back more than four points to 17x — both consistent with a post-earnings reset rather than a growth re-rating. EPS momentum scores remain strong at 88-89 percentile on both 30- and 90-day views, suggesting estimates have not collapsed, but the 12-month forward EPS growth score ranks only in the 24th percentile, flagging that growth expectations have moderated. The short score ranks in the 12th percentile — meaning the stock scores "short-friendly" relative to the broader universe, even if the borrow market itself remains uncrowded.
The next earnings event lands October 30. With the Google contract situation unresolved and short interest near its highest level in months, the key watch into that print is whether daily active user numbers hold — PINS fell 12% on the week, suggesting the broader social media advertising backdrop is not providing any tailwind — and whether management offers any clarity on the data licensing pipeline that underpins the most optimistic analyst targets.
See the live data behind this article on ORTEX.
Open RDDT on ORTEX →ORTEX Market Intelligence content is generated by AI from a snapshot of ORTEX's proprietary data. Content is informational only and does not constitute investment advice.
