CrowdStrike closes out September with a genuine tension: short sellers who briefly blinked last week have come back with conviction, rebuilding positions into a stock that has just added 20% in a month and 5% in a week to close at $262.74.
The short-side reversal is the story that demands attention first. Short interest, which had fallen to 9.9% of free float in the previous note, has climbed back to 10.8% of float, an 8% increase on the week. That is a meaningful rebuild, not noise. The jump happened in a single step: shorts added roughly 2.8 million shares between September 22 and September 24, then held relatively flat through month-end. Despite the higher short count, the borrow market offers bears no friction at all. Availability is effectively unlimited, and cost-to-borrow has actually eased back to 0.40% after a brief spike to 0.51% mid-week. Options positioning is nearly neutral, with the put/call ratio at 0.97, barely above its 20-day average of 0.96 and with a z-score of just 0.42. The picture is one of bears returning by conviction rather than by necessity, with no squeeze dynamics to worry about on either side.
The Street has moved largely in the bulls' direction, but the consensus hides a valuation disagreement. Morgan Stanley's Keith Weiss raised his target to $254 and B of A lifted to $260, both within the past two weeks, while Stephens pushed to $280. The mean target across the coverage universe is $235.67, which is below where the stock is trading now at $262.74, a rare positioning where the consensus has been overtaken by the rally. One notable outlier is Bernstein at $132, a level that implies deep skepticism about valuation sustainability and drags the mean lower. The bull case rests on Falcon platform consolidation, AI-native security expansion, and FY27 NNARR growth of roughly 34%. Bears point to execution risk around the CFO transition, concentration in VC ownership at roughly 38% of shares, and a P/E multiple now above 173x trailing earnings. Forward earnings momentum is strong on a 12-month basis (94th percentile rank), but 30-day and 90-day EPS momentum scores sit at 12 and 3 respectively, a sign that near-term estimate revisions have stalled.
CEO George Kurtz sold roughly 12,000 shares on September 24 and 25, totalling approximately $2.6 million. All transactions carry 10b5-1 plan disclosures, marking them as pre-arranged sales rather than discretionary judgments about the stock's prospects. Insider sales under a 10b5-1 plan are compensation mechanics, not conviction signals, but the 90-day net position across all insiders is negative $170 million on net sales of 666,000 shares, reflecting a sustained pattern of executives monetising into the rally. On the institutional side, FMR and JP Morgan Asset Management both added materially in the most recent period, each adding north of 14 million shares, while Accel Management trimmed by 1.5 million. The passive holders, BlackRock at 8.5% and Vanguard at 6.9%, both added incrementally.
The last earnings print gave bulls their best day in recent memory: the stock jumped nearly 23% the following session after the August 26 report, and held most of those gains over the next five days with an additional 10% move. That remains a live reference point for how aggressively the market can re-rate the name on a strong quarter. The next event is December 1, 62 days out.
Retail attention, tracked via Wikipedia page views, registered a z-score of 2.65 against the prior 90-day average as of early September, a high reading that aligns with the broader momentum the stock has built since August. With short sellers rebuilding into a stock that has already priced in a strong result, and the consensus mean target now sitting below the current price, the December print becomes the clearest near-term arbiter of whether the rebound has run ahead of fundamentals or is still catching up to them.
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