Macy's heads into its September 10 earnings report under meaningful short pressure and a stock that has shed 15% in a month.
Short sellers have been quietly building their position. Short interest has climbed roughly 4% over the past month to 11.8% of the free float — a genuinely elevated level for a retailer at this stage of its restructuring. The weekly pace of accumulation, up 3.4% in seven days, suggests bears added conviction ahead of today's release rather than covering into it. The ORTEX short score has ticked up from 55 to 58 over the past two weeks, a gradual but steady drift higher. Yet the borrow market itself tells a different story: availability is running at 702%, well into normal territory and a long way from any kind of squeeze setup. Cost to borrow is barely 0.46%, down slightly on the week. The short thesis here is fundamental, not mechanical — there is no lending-market tightness to force capitulation. Options positioning adds to the cautious tone without amplifying it; the put/call ratio is 1.09, almost exactly in line with its 20-day average and nowhere near the 1.62 extreme the ratio hit at its 52-week high. Hedging demand is present but not elevated.
The bull-bear divide heading into the print centres on whether Macy's "Next Chapter" store transformation can offset structural revenue headwinds. Bulls point to the 20 consecutive quarters of comparable-sales growth across the company's nameplates, accelerating credit-card revenue up 17% and a Reimagined-store format that comped ahead of the fleet. Morgan Stanley reinstated with an Overweight and a $30 target in July, the most constructive call on the stock in recent months. Bears counter that net sales fell 1.7% last quarter, adjusted EBITDA margins are projected to narrow sharply from 6.3% to roughly 5%, and tariff headwinds have not been fully absorbed. UBS maintains a Sell with a $10 target — a stark outlier given the consensus mean of $23.45 — while most of the Street clusters around neutral ratings. The stock at $21.51 now trades below the consensus mean, which has drifted up from the low-$20s after a round of target increases following the prior quarter's beat.
Institutional ownership adds one notable data point. Berkshire Hathaway reported a position of around 7.3 million shares as of June 30, having added more than 4.3 million shares in that quarter — a meaningful step-up from a firm not known for retail exposure. American Century also added over 1.1 million shares through August. On the other side, Vanguard's main 13G filing showed the stake falling to effectively zero from nearly 10% previously, a substantial reduction (though per ORTEX's disclosure note, 13D/G stakes are event-driven around the 5% threshold and holders dropping below that level may not file again). The CFO made a small discretionary open-market sale of around $409,000 in late June — not a large transaction in isolation, but notable in the absence of any insider buying.
The print will test whether the Reimagined store programme is scaling fast enough to stabilise the top line while management demonstrates it can protect margins in a tariff-affected, promotional retail environment.
See the live data behind this article on ORTEX.
Open M 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.
