ONON enters its September 22 earnings report with short sellers rebuilding positions at the fastest pace in months — and a stock already down 11% in the past month sitting just below where its own co-CEOs bought aggressively in August.
The short interest story is the sharpest tension in this setup. Estimated shares short jumped 39% in a single session on September 10, lifting the short interest to 7.8% of the free float — the highest reading in the past six weeks and a near-doubling of the mid-August low when positions had been quietly unwinding. That single-day surge is striking. For context, shorts had been steady in the 16–17 million share range through most of August before this week's lurch to 23.5 million. The borrow market itself shows no distress: availability is extremely loose at 858%, with ample supply in the lending pool, and the cost to borrow is a negligible 0.57%. The ORTEX short score ticked up to 50.9 on September 10 from 44.2 just two days earlier — still mid-range, but the direction is unambiguous. What the data describes is a deliberate re-entry of short conviction, not a squeeze-risk environment.
Options traders, by contrast, have shifted toward the call side relative to recent history. The put/call ratio has eased to 0.86, roughly 1.3 standard deviations below its 20-day average of 0.91 — more bullish than typical positioning for this name. That divergence is worth marking: short sellers are adding, but options traders are not piling into downside protection ahead of the print. The two camps are telling different stories about the risk.
The analyst picture adds further complexity. Morgan Stanley reinstated coverage on September 10 with an Overweight and a $39 target — the highest-profile fresh look since the August earnings disaster. BMO initiated the same week at Market Perform with a $28 target, essentially a hold at current prices. Both moves came after a wave of post-earnings target cuts on August 12, when Stifel, Truist, Evercore, Barclays, Baird, and Raymond James all trimmed, with Stifel going from $60 to $41 and Baird from $70 to $55. Raymond James downgraded outright from Strong Buy to Outperform. The consensus remains Buy, with the mean target at $35.53 — about 30% above the $27.41 close. The bull case rests on DTC momentum and brand strength in 80-plus countries; the bear case is the softer Americas wholesale channel and an innovation cycle reset that won't hit until early 2027. The valuation multiples have re-rated sharply lower over the past month — the P/E has compressed by more than two turns to 13.7x — reflecting how much the earnings shock repriced the growth story.
The ownership table carries one genuinely notable signal. Co-CEOs Caspar Coppetti and Olivier Bernhard each bought 65,000 shares at $30.67 on August 14 — around $2 million apiece, discretionary open-market purchases with no 10b5-1 plan attached. That is the kind of buying that matters: two founders stepping in personally at a price now about 11% above where the stock trades. Baron Capital also added 7.2 million shares in Q2, the largest single institutional increase in the top-holder list. FMR (Fidelity), meanwhile, trimmed its stake from 8.1% to 5.4% as disclosed in its August 6 Schedule 13G/A. The co-CEO buys and the Fidelity reduction sit on opposite sides of the ledger, but the insider conviction at $30.67 is the harder signal to dismiss.
The earnings history delivers a clear warning. The August 11 print produced a 20% single-day decline and a nearly identical 20% five-day loss — a severe reaction that reset the entire valuation framework. With the next report scheduled for September 22, that precedent will dominate sentiment in the days ahead, particularly given how quietly shorts rebuilt positions in the final session of available data. What to watch is whether the wholesale channel shows any stabilization in the Americas and whether management offers any forward commentary on the 2027 product cycle — because on this stock, right now, guidance language will matter more than the headline numbers.
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