CCL Shorts Surge 20% as Q3 Earnings Loom

Carnival Corporation heads into its September 25 earnings report with short sellers rebuilding positions at the fastest pace in months, even as the Street holds broadly bullish ratings and analysts trim targets across the board.

The most striking development this week is the sharp rebuild in short positions. Short interest jumped 20% in seven days to 3.9% of the float — rising from roughly 37.7 million shares on September 9 to 45.4 million by September 15. That's a 37% increase over the past month, the steepest accumulation since early August. The direction matters more than the absolute level: at under 4% of float, the position is not crowded by historical standards, but the speed of the build — concentrated almost entirely in the five sessions before the earnings print — points to targeted pre-results hedging rather than a structural bear case taking hold.

The borrow market tells a story of easy supply meeting growing demand. Availability is at roughly 5,850% — meaning shares to borrow vastly outnumber those already borrowed, making it cheap and simple for shorts to press the trade. Cost to borrow ticked up 12.5% on the week to 0.44%, but that remains firmly in "low" territory and well below its summer highs above 0.59%. Availability itself has tightened by roughly a third over the past week as short demand grows, though from an extremely loose base. Options positioning has moved in the opposite direction from its August peak: the put/call ratio has eased to 1.25, about one standard deviation below its 20-day mean of 1.31, suggesting options traders are actually less defensively positioned than they were a month ago, when the PCR hit its 52-week high of 1.42. That divergence — shorts building, options hedging easing — makes the setup harder to read cleanly.

Analysts have spent the past three days cutting targets in unison without abandoning their bullish ratings, a pattern that reads as calibration rather than capitulation. Stifel, Barclays, Deutsche Bank, and Wells Fargo all lowered price targets this week; the first three kept positive or hold ratings, while Wells Fargo held its Overweight. The Street's mean target now stands near $34.83, implying around 58% upside to the current price of $22.11 — a gap that reflects how hard the stock has been hit. CCL is down 21% over the past month and nearly 5% on the week alone, underperforming even close peers: NCLH fell 7.2% on the week and RCL dropped 5.7%, but CCL lagged both. Valuation has compressed sharply — the P/E multiple has dropped 2.3 points over 30 days to roughly 9x, while EV/EBITDA has slipped to 7.5x. The ORTEX short score has crept up to 34.2, its highest reading in the data window, though still in moderate territory. Against that backdrop, bulls point to strong forward booking demand, fleet modernisation, and the PROPEL efficiency programme targeting 50% earnings growth by 2029. Bears note the stock's sensitivity to macro softness and an elevated debt load that leaves less room for error.

One name on the register worth noting: Richard L. Kohan holds an 8.06% stake via a Schedule 13D/A filing — the activist designation on that form is on the record, though the filing dates from November 2025. As always with 13D/G disclosures, the position is as last disclosed around the 5% threshold; holders dropping below that level may not file again. There has been no fresh activist filing this year, so the practical influence of that stake on near-term direction is unclear. On the institutional side, FMR (Fidelity) added over 10.3 million shares through August, one of the larger recent accumulations among top holders — a notable vote of confidence from a major active manager even as the price has continued to slide.

Carnival last reported on June 23, when the stock fell 4.2% on the day and extended those losses to 5.4% over the following five sessions. The September 25 print arrives with the stock trading roughly 21% below where it was at the time of that report. How management frames forward booking trends, pricing power, and the pace of debt reduction relative to the PROPEL targets will determine whether the recent short build looks prescient or premature.