MongoDB has just reported earnings and the Street's response is a wave of target-price cuts, landing on a stock that already lost 21% in the past week.
The earnings report, delivered on September 29, produced a textbook bad reaction. Shares fell 17% the next day. The five-day move from the print is now negative 21.5%. That extends a savage month: MDB has dropped 24.5% over thirty days, from around $450 in mid-August to $337.19 at Tuesday's close. The stock bounced 0.75% on Wednesday, but that barely registers against the scale of the drawdown.
The analyst community came out Wednesday morning with a near-uniform response: hold your rating, lower the target. DA Davidson and BMO Capital both maintained Buy-equivalent ratings while trimming targets. Stifel cut its target from $465 to $385, still Buy. UBS held Neutral and lowered to $375. Stephens reduced its Equal-Weight target to $372. Of the names active Wednesday, only Citizens and RBC held their targets unchanged, at $519 and $465 respectively. Guggenheim sits at $560 with a Buy, the most bullish marker on the board. The mean target across the coverage universe is $448, implying roughly 33% upside from current levels, but that gap is in part a function of targets that have not yet been adjusted post-earnings rather than genuine conviction at the price. The bull case rests on Atlas cloud growth running in the mid-to-high 20s, total revenue growth around 22%, and MongoDB's positioning as infrastructure for the GenAI application layer. The bear case is simpler: expectations were high, the stock had outperformed by 36 percentage points versus the IGV index month-to-date going into the print, and execution risk against those elevated forecasts was always the central vulnerability.
Positioning in the lending market tells a calm story. Short interest is 3.4% of the free float, essentially unchanged from the pre-earnings note filed Monday. It rose just 1.7% on Tuesday and has actually fallen 6.8% over the week in share terms, as some shorts who built positions into the event began to cover. Borrow conditions remain extraordinarily loose. Availability is near its maximum cap reading, meaning shares to borrow are plentiful relative to what is already out on loan. Cost to borrow has dropped 31% over the week to 0.35%, the lowest level in thirty days. The short score sits at 32.5, easing from 34.2 two weeks ago, consistent with the idea that short-selling pressure is not intensifying after the earnings drop. Squeezable this is not.
Options positioning is also unremarkable. The put/call ratio at 0.61 sits almost exactly at its 20-day mean of 0.62, with a z-score near zero. There is no obvious surge in put buying for downside protection following the print, nor is there aggressive call buying for a bounce. The 52-week range runs from 0.48 to 1.34, so the current reading is squarely in the middle, leaning slightly call-heavy but without conviction either way.
Wikipedia attention is a different matter. The retail attention signal, measured as the average z-score of daily English Wikipedia views and ORTEX page traffic against the prior 90 days, registered 4.35 standard deviations above its own baseline. That is a significant spike in retail interest, almost certainly a function of the earnings event and the sharp price move. High attention readings are not revenue indicators, but they do suggest the name is on traders' radars at a level it has not been recently.
From an ownership perspective, BlackRock added around 617,000 shares in August to reach 7.87% of outstanding shares, the largest disclosed holding. FMR (Fidelity) added roughly 1.46 million shares in the same period to 4.44%. No activist 13D filings are on the register. Insider activity has been entirely via pre-arranged 10b5-1 plans, so it carries limited signal: director Dwight Merriman sold shares in August at prices around $450 to $472, well above current levels, but those were scheduled disposals rather than discretionary calls.
The next earnings event is December 1. Between now and then, the debate is whether the Q2 Atlas growth figure that disappointed the Street was a one-quarter stumble or the start of a deceleration that makes the current valuation, around 45x trailing earnings and 32x EV/EBITDA, harder to defend.
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