Coinbase Global ends September with short sellers in full retreat, the stock down 5% on the week, and the Street scrambling to catch up on a name it had largely abandoned.
The short cover story has moved fast since last week's note. Short interest has dropped from 28.4 million shares to 23.2 million, an 18% decline over the week, bringing the position down to 10.2% of free float. That is still elevated by any standard, but the pace of covering is notable: last Tuesday alone saw roughly 4.7 million shares closed out, the sharpest single-session unwind in the 30-day history. The ORTEX short score reflects the shift, sliding from 58.9 at its mid-September peak to 52.7, moving from moderately bearish territory toward neutral. This is no longer the same standoff documented a week ago, where 29 million shares sat underwater on a rally and barely flinched. Shorts are exiting in size now. The lending market confirms there is no mechanical pressure forcing them out: availability has actually loosened sharply, rising 34% on the week to 518%, meaning more than five shares sit available in the pool for every one currently borrowed. Cost to borrow remains negligible at 0.42%. Bears are covering by choice, not by necessity.
Options positioning adds a wrinkle to the bullish read on short covering. The put/call ratio eased to 0.78 on Tuesday from 0.87 on Monday, but it remains above its 20-day average of 0.72 and sits at a z-score of 1.07, meaning options traders are still carrying more defensive hedging than usual. The 52-week high on the PCR is 0.88, reached just this Monday. The pattern across the past three weeks is a gradual drift upward in put demand even as shorts trimmed, suggesting the two communities are reading the tape differently. Shorter-term options flow turned cautious precisely as the short book started thinning.
The analyst community has gone in the opposite direction this week. Two fresh initiations and target raises arrived on Monday. Keefe, Bruyette & Woods reinstated with an Outperform rating and a $237 target. Baird, though keeping a Neutral stance, lifted its target from $130 to $205, the more telling move given how dramatically stale the prior $130 figure had become relative to a stock trading near $190. Morgan Stanley initiated earlier in the month at Equal-Weight with a $250 target, and Goldman Sachs raised to $219 in early September. The consensus sits at a buy, with a mean target of $207, implying roughly 9% upside from Tuesday's close of $190. The bull case rests on Coinbase's scale advantages, $246 billion of assets on platform, custody of over 80% of US Bitcoin and Ethereum ETF assets, and the push into derivatives, stablecoins, and the x402 payments infrastructure. The bear case centres on the durability problem: transaction fees remain the dominant revenue driver, USDC market cap declined around 5% in Q2, and spot trading volume fell 24% quarter on quarter into Q2. The valuation reflects that unresolved tension. The PE multiple has compressed 35 points over the past 30 days to 119 times, while EV/EBITDA has moved in the other direction, up 3.6 points to 26 times. The earnings surprise factor rank is at the 98th percentile, but the EV/EBIT factor rank sits at just the 1st percentile, near the bottom of the universe.
On the ownership side, retail attention has picked up. The Wikipedia views dataset from the Wikimedia Foundation shows a z-score of 2.41 on retail attention relative to Coinbase's own 90-day history, the highest reading in the recent window. That is attention, not a revenue signal, but it aligns with a week where the stock was generating headlines around analyst activity and short covering. Insider selling has been routine and plan-driven: CFO Alesia Haas sold roughly $8 million of stock on September 21 under a pre-arranged 10b5-1 plan. Director Marc Andreessen sold $1.4 million under the same mechanism the same day. Neither trade carries the conviction signal of a discretionary sale. The founder's family trust, via Brian Armstrong, remains the largest single holder at 12.3% of shares.
The stock fell 5% on the week to $190, giving back part of the prior week's 17% rally. Close peers moved similarly: HOOD dropped 6.5%, SBET fell 7.5%, and BLSH gave up 12.3%. The most recent comparable earnings print, the Q2 release on July 30, saw the stock fall 8.6% on the day and another 0.5% through the following five sessions. No next earnings date is currently set, so the next catalyst is likely to be either a crypto market move or further analyst re-ratings as the Street catches up on a name it underweighted through the first half of 2026. The question going into October is whether the short cover has run its course at 10% of float, or whether the remaining 23 million borrowed shares represent a second wave still to unwind.
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