Salesforce enters the final week of September with an interesting disconnect: short sellers who sprinted back in after the Q3 print are now quietly retreating, while a wave of analyst target upgrades sits well above where the stock is actually trading.
The short rebuild flagged in the September 16 note has already started to unwind. Short interest fell nearly 2% on Tuesday to 28.6 million shares — 3.0% of the free float — after touching an intra-week peak above 33 million shares on September 16 and 17. That mid-week high was the most aggressive re-entry shorts had attempted since late August, but it lasted less than three sessions before covering resumed. The borrow market is offering no friction to either side. Cost to borrow sits at 0.39%, well below the brief September 17 spike to 1.0%, and availability is extraordinarily loose at roughly 7,700% — meaning shares to borrow outnumber shares already borrowed by more than 77 to one. The lending pool is effectively unlimited. With a short score of 33.7 and utilization ranked in the 68th percentile, the overall positioning picture reads as cautious tinkering rather than a conviction short.
Options are sending a mildly contrarian message. The put/call ratio has slipped to 0.99, just below its 20-day average of 1.02 and sitting near the more bullish end of its recent range. That's a meaningful shift from the 1.20 reading on September 18 — the highest of the past year — when defensive hedging was most intense immediately after earnings. The current level suggests options traders have dialled back their post-earnings caution, even as the stock has pulled back 8.8% on the week to $233.28.
The analyst community is far more optimistic than the tape. A cluster of firms raised price targets in the 48 hours following the earnings print. Stifel went to $300, Guggenheim and Canaccord both lifted to $300, BMO Capital moved to $285, and Citigroup raised to $263 while holding a Neutral rating. The consensus mean target now stands at $281, implying roughly 20% upside from current levels. Bulls are anchoring on Salesforce's push into AI — the AIforce platform and the proprietary Koa reasoning model — alongside management's guidance for net-new ARR reacceleration. Bears are less convinced, noting that building a proprietary AI model runs against the industry grain toward open-source, potentially adding cost without proportionate customer benefit. The PE sits at 14.4x and EV/EBITDA at 10.0x, neither stretched nor cheap for an enterprise software franchise of this scale. EPS momentum over 30 days ranks in the 92nd percentile, flagging that estimate revisions have been running hard, even as the forward EPS year-on-year growth picture remains under pressure.
The institutional register looks stable. BlackRock holds 8.8% and has been adding modestly. Capital Research added roughly 900,000 shares through August. Morgan Stanley trimmed nearly 7.7 million shares through June — the most notable reduction among the top holders — though that data predates the recent earnings move. There are no 13D activists on the register. On the insider side, Director Kirk Blair made a near-$1 million open-market purchase on September 18 at $239.33 — a clean discretionary buy, not under a 10b5-1 plan — which is worth noting against the week's drift lower. The net insider picture over 90 days is marginally negative in value terms, though the bulk of that reflects compensation-related tax-withholding transactions from the COO and CLO, not discretionary selling.
Close peers have had a rougher week. ADBE fell 7.6%, HUBS dropped nearly 10%, and BOX shed 5.5%, making CRM's 8.8% decline look more like broad enterprise software weakness than a company-specific story. The next earnings date is December 2, giving the stock roughly ten weeks to close the gap between where analysts think it should trade and where it actually is — a gap that will likely widen or narrow depending on how the AI monetisation narrative develops between now and then.
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