CRTO enters the final stretch before its October 30 earnings with a stock down 10% over the past month, yet options traders are positioned more bullishly than at almost any point in the past year — a striking divergence from the brutal selloff that followed the last print.
The options picture is the clearest signal this week. The put/call ratio has collapsed to 0.13, near its 52-week low of 0.12 and well below the 20-day average of 0.18. That means calls outnumber puts by roughly seven-to-one — an unusually one-sided setup for a stock that has been losing ground steadily. The z-score of -0.45 confirms this skew is outside the recent norm, though not at an extreme. Whatever drove the August spike in defensive positioning — the PCR was above 0.60 in early August — has fully unwound. Options traders are now leaning hard into upside.
The lending market offers no friction to counter that optimism. Borrow availability is extremely loose, running at roughly 4,643% — meaning shares available to borrow dwarf the shares already short by a factor of more than 46. That is close to the widest the lending pool has been all year. Cost to borrow has also eased sharply, falling nearly 46% over the past month to just 0.55%, having been above 1.5% as recently as early August. Short interest itself dropped roughly 23% over the past week, settling near 1.2 million shares after a clear step-down from the 1.57 million range that prevailed through most of August and early September. There is no squeeze pressure here, and shorts are retreating rather than adding conviction.
The Street picture is where the tension lives. Valuation multiples are low in absolute terms — EV/EBITDA is running near 1.9x and the P/E near 4.5x, with the price-to-book down to 0.68 — but the EV/EBIT factor score ranks in the 94th percentile of the universe, meaning Criteo screens as genuinely cheap on that measure relative to peers. The earnings yield (EP) of 0.22 points in the same direction. Against that, the EPS surprise score sits in just the 29th percentile, flagging that the company has not been a consistent beat-and-raise story. The short score of 33.2 is moderate and has been edging higher this week after easing through early September, though it remains far from alarm territory. The ORTEX combined score of 33.1 suggests the market is pricing in some continued underperformance.
What makes the institutional picture worth a glance is the scale of the holding changes. Michael Komasinski shows a fresh 343,891-share position — a new stake reported at end-August. Connor McGogney similarly appears with a new 185,353-share position as of September 1. These are not institutional fund flows; they read as insider-adjacent or executive-level disclosures rather than asset manager activity. Columbia Management, the largest conventional institutional holder, added modestly in July. None of this is a loud accumulation signal, but the new positions appearing near the lows are worth noting.
The earnings history is the clearest anchor for what comes next. The August 5 print produced a 21.5% single-day drop and a 22.5% five-day loss — a severe reaction that re-priced the stock from above $21 to where it trades now. The prior print in late July delivered a more modest 2.6% one-day fall but a 16.2% five-day loss. The pattern is consistent: earnings have been a source of pain, not relief. With the next event set for October 30, the gap between the call-heavy options positioning and the stock's recent earnings track record is the central tension to watch into that date.
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