ONON heads into its September 22 earnings print with the most contested positioning it has seen in months — short sellers who rebuilt aggressively are now facing co-CEOs who put nearly $4 million of their own money to work on the other side.
The short interest picture has evolved since the September 10 surge described in our earlier note. Estimated shares short have eased slightly from the 23.5 million peak but remain near 22.9 million — still 7.6% of the free float and roughly 35% higher than a week ago. The borrow market remains orderly: availability has tightened from 858% to around 460%, a meaningful move in relative terms, though it still signals ample lending supply. Cost to borrow is negligible at 0.49%. The ORTEX short score climbed to 55 — its highest reading of the past two weeks — confirming that the short rebuild has continued, even if the pace has slowed. This is not a squeeze setup; it is a considered bearish position being maintained into a binary event.
Options traders are telling a different story. The put/call ratio has fallen to 0.78, running well below its 20-day average of 0.88 — more than a standard deviation on the bullish side. That shift has been rapid: the PCR was above 0.97 as recently as late August. Taken together, the options market and the short book are pointing in opposite directions, which makes the print itself the only thing that can resolve the tension.
The bull-bear debate has genuine substance. Bulls point to On Holding's direct-to-consumer economics, premium pricing power, and the expectation that top and bottom lines continue growing 20-25% annually — a thesis reinforced by Morgan Stanley reinstating coverage at Overweight with a $39 target last week and multiple firms maintaining Buy ratings. The counter-argument is harder to dismiss: over 90% of revenue still comes from running shoes, wholesale has been softening, and the company already cut its FY26 sales outlook. Bank of America trimmed its target from $46 to $43 while holding its Buy rating, a reluctant but telling adjustment. The mean analyst target around $35 implies roughly 29% upside from the current $27.26, but the stock has underperformed almost every peer in the sector this year — CROX is up 13% on the week alone, LULU added 2.6%, and BIRK gained 1.6%, while ONON slipped another half a percent.
The most concrete signal heading into the print comes from the insider register. Co-CEOs Caspar Coppetti and Olivier Bernhard each purchased 65,000 shares on August 14 at roughly $30.67, a combined outlay of nearly $4 million in open-market, discretionary transactions — filed under SEC Form 4 without any 10b5-1 plan designation. That is a meaningful statement of conviction, made at prices above where the stock trades today. The CFO and COO, by contrast, sold small parcels on September 8 following option exercises — compensation-mechanics transactions that carry far less signal. The net 90-day insider flow is solidly positive at just under $3.9 million.
The August 11 earnings report remains a sober reference point: the stock fell 20% in a single session and held most of those losses over the following five days. That reaction reflected the guidance cut. The September 22 print will test whether the co-CEOs' conviction at $30 was well-placed, or whether the bears who have been rebuilding short positions at scale for the past two weeks had the better read on the underlying trajectory.
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