NYT enters the week after a brutal earnings reaction, with options traders now the most defensively positioned they have been in months.
The stock fell 14.3% on August 5 after its Q2 print, and has spent the weeks since trying to find a floor. It has not quite managed that. Another sharp leg down arrived this week — NYT lost 8.7% in five sessions to close at $65.45, bringing the one-month decline to just under 1% from a much lower base than where it started August. The picture is of a stock that bounced after earnings, drifted, and then sold off again as macro or sentiment pressure returned.
The clearest signal right now is in options. Defensive positioning has spiked sharply, with the put/call ratio jumping to 2.24 — more than 2.6 standard deviations above its 20-day average of 1.28. That is the most elevated reading in well over a month, and it arrived in a hurry: the PCR was running below 1.2 as recently as two weeks ago before accelerating through September expiry. Traders are buying a lot more downside protection than normal relative to calls. The borrow market tells a very different story, however. Availability is wide at 779% — meaning there are nearly eight shares available to borrow for every one already shorted — and cost to borrow sits at a negligible 0.46%. Short interest has actually been falling, down 18% over the past month to 7.4% of the free float, with a single-day drop of 6.9% on September 22. Short sellers are not piling in here; if anything, they have been covering. The tension between retreating short sellers and surging put demand is the interesting positioning story this week.
The Street sits constructively above where the stock trades, but the gap has narrowed with the recent selloff. The consensus is a buy, with six buy ratings versus three holds, and the mean price target runs at $79 — implying roughly 21% upside from current levels. The most notable recent action came from Guggenheim on September 15, when analyst Curry Baker upgraded NYT to Buy and lifted the target from $70 to $82, moving from the sideline just days before this week's selldown. Evercore ISI and Barclays both trimmed targets after the August earnings miss — Evercore to $85 from $92, Barclays to $63 from $66 — reflecting reduced conviction on near-term execution while maintaining their respective ratings. The analyst recommendation differential factor scores in the 96th percentile, meaning NYT's consensus positioning is unusually bullish relative to the broader universe, even after the post-earnings target cuts. The bear case centres on subscriber growth disappointing expectations, opaque reporting disclosures post-earnings, and modest ARPU expansion. Bulls point to AI-enabled product development, first-party data monetisation, and double-digit digital revenue growth as the path to justifying a mid-teens EV/EBITDA multiple. That multiple has compressed: EV/EBITDA is now 13.6x, down 1.4 turns over the past 30 days, and the P/E has slipped to 21.4x from 22.3x a month ago.
The ownership register has a notable feature. Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway filed a Schedule 13G in May disclosing a 9.4% stake at 15.1 million shares, making it the second-largest disclosed holder alongside BlackRock at 9.76%. Berkshire's stake, as with all 13D/G positions, is as last disclosed — the filing was a first-time disclosure, and positions around the 5% threshold can shift without an immediate re-filing. AQR also emerged with a fresh 5.1% passive stake in May. On the insider side, the 90-day net picture is modestly negative at around -$1.4 million in net value, though the transactions are dominated by tax-withholding codes (type F) rather than discretionary open-market sales — a compensation mechanism rather than a conviction signal.
The next earnings event is scheduled for November 4. The last print produced a one-day move of -14.3% and a five-day move of -15.4% — the kind of magnitude that explains why options traders are stacking puts well ahead of the date. Whether the Guggenheim upgrade, Buffett's disclosed stake, and a now-compressed valuation are enough to change the framing for that print is the question the market will spend the next six weeks debating.
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