COUR heads into October with short sellers and a major shareholder pulling in opposite directions, one of the sharper positioning contradictions in the education sector right now.
Short interest is the defining tension this week. Bears have rebuilt aggressively: the short position climbed 22% over the past five sessions to 14.3% of free float, one of the largest weekly increases in recent history for this name. The jump was concentrated mid-week, with shares short surging from roughly 19.1 million to 23.4 million between September 22 and September 24 in a single step. The stock itself fell 9.1% on the week to $4.67, a 28% decline over the past month. Yet despite that renewed bearish conviction, the borrow market tells a different story. Availability is wide open at 952%, meaning there are nearly ten shares available to lend for every one already borrowed, and borrow cost has actually fallen 29% this week to just 0.47%. Shorts are adding to positions cheaply and without constraint, which removes any mechanical squeeze pressure for now. The ORTEX short score, which jumped from the high-40s to 51.8 around September 23 in lockstep with the short interest surge, confirms the shift but sits at a middling level rather than signalling extreme positioning.
What makes the bearish rebuild harder to read in isolation is what Pale Fire Capital SE did on the very same days. The firm, a 10%-plus owner per its September 29 Schedule 13G/A filing (which updated its stake from 5.8% to 10.9%), bought 1 million shares on September 29 at $4.61, adding to a purchase of 1.33 million shares on September 25 at $5.06. Together the two trades total roughly $11.4 million in open-market buying, executed without a 10b5-1 plan, as the stock was breaking to new lows. Pale Fire now holds 28.8 million shares, making it the largest single disclosed holder. No other 13D/G filing on the register carries activist intent: BlackRock and Baillie Gifford are passive holders, and Vanguard appears to have exited entirely from its prior 9.7% stake by March 2026. Stakes are as-last-disclosed around the 5% threshold and can fall below without a further filing.
The Street has gone quiet. The most recent analyst action was Goldman Sachs upgrading from Sell to Neutral on August 3, lifting its target from $5.50 to $6.50. Before that, BMO maintained Outperform with an $8 target in early July, and BofA trimmed to $7 while staying Neutral in late June. The consensus mean target of $8.17 implies roughly 75% upside from current levels, but that figure is heavily influenced by Needham's $10 Buy. With the stock now at $4.67, well below every published target, the question is how stale those numbers are: none of the on-record moves is more recent than eight weeks. EPS momentum scores are actually solid, with 30-day and 90-day momentum ranking in the 70th and 77th percentiles, and forward earnings revisions rank in the 71st percentile. But EPS surprise sits in just the 3rd percentile, meaning the company has consistently missed near-term estimates even as the forward outlook has improved.
The bull and bear cases are well-defined. Bulls point to 205 million registered learners after 22 consecutive quarters of meaningful adds, guided FY26 revenue of $805-$815 million, and a path to high-teens EBITDA margins via cost synergies from the Udemy acquisition. Bears counter that the Consumer segment remains in a managed decline, with average selling prices under pressure and Udemy's transactional model weighing on top-of-funnel demand through FY27. The P/B multiple has compressed 40% over 30 days to 1.17x, and the stock now trades at 6x trailing earnings, a low absolute multiple that nonetheless reflects no confidence in near-term growth. Options positioning is unremarkable: the put/call ratio of 0.42 is barely above its 20-day average and well below the 52-week high of 0.51, so derivatives traders are not particularly defensive despite the price action.
The next earnings print is October 29. The last two results sent the stock down 6% and 10% on the day respectively, with five-day follow-through roughly flat in both cases. With short sellers freshly rebuilt at 14% of float and a large passive holder buying into the weakness at these same prices, what October 29 most needs to resolve is whether the Consumer segment deterioration is stabilising or deepening.
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