General Mills delivered its September 16 earnings print with a notable split emerging: options traders have turned their most bullish in months, even as short sellers added to positions for the second straight week.
The sharpest move this week is in options, where the put/call ratio has dropped to 0.81 — nearly two and a half standard deviations below its 20-day average of 0.91, the most call-skewed reading in at least a year. That is a meaningful reversal. A week ago, the ratio was running in line with its recent average; now it signals unusual demand for upside exposure relative to downside protection. The last quarterly print — which came in July — delivered an 8% single-day gain, and traders appear to be positioning for a repeat rather than hedging against disappointment.
Short interest tells a more cautious story. Bears added 9.4% to their position over the past week, pushing short interest to 8.9% of the free float — back near the levels seen in early August before a month of covering. The reversal is notable: shorts had trimmed steadily through August, dropping from above 10% of float to roughly 8.6%, only to rebuild as the earnings date approached. Borrow remains straightforward: availability runs at 275%, well above the 12-month floor of 145%, and cost to borrow is a modest 0.50%. There is no squeeze pressure here. Shorts can add freely, and the borrow market is not yet tight enough to force any unwinding.
The Street is cautious but not uniformly negative. Evercore ISI trimmed its target to $38 from $39 on September 14, maintaining an In-Line rating — a minor downgrade in conviction rather than a directional call. BofA lifted its target to $43 on September 1, staying Neutral. The mean price target of roughly $37.67 sits only marginally above the current price of $36.58, leaving little implied upside in the consensus. JP Morgan remains Underweight with a $35 target — below the current price — which is the clearest bearish anchor on the Street. The bull case centres on cost-cutting and operating leverage, while bears focus on structural pet food headwinds, flat organic sales guidance, and SNAP-related volume pressure on key brands like Totino's. Valuation offers limited comfort: the PE multiple has compressed around 11x, down roughly a full turn over the past month, and EV/EBITDA is near 10.4x — modest for a staples name but reflective of a growth profile that few analysts find compelling. The forward EPS growth factor scores in the 97th percentile for 12-month estimate increases, but EPS surprise ranks in just the 2nd percentile — a combination that suggests estimates have been cut so aggressively that even a modest beat looks like outperformance on paper.
Institutional ownership is broadly stable. BlackRock holds 11.7% of shares and added 1.76 million shares through August. Charles Schwab and Goldman Sachs each added meaningful positions in the same period, while Vanguard Portfolio Management trimmed by roughly 1.2 million shares. The top-holder register is heavily passive, which limits the read-through for conviction signals — there is no active manager making an aggressive directional bet visible in the data.
Earnings history offers one useful data point. The most recent prior print, in July, produced an 8% single-day gain and held roughly 4% of that through the following week. Whether the September setup — more short interest, more call buying, a stock already down 7% on the month — produces a similar outcome is the question the market is currently pricing. With the next event date confirmed for September 23, what to watch is whether the call-heavy options positioning holds into the print, or begins to unwind if the stock fails to hold the post-earnings reaction.
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