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CrowdStrike enters the new week with short sellers at their most committed level in months, a BMO analyst raising his target by $60 in a single move, and a CEO selling into every session, all while the stock gave back nearly 5% on Wednesday.
Short interest has continued its steady climb that began in late September. It now stands at 11.0% of free float, up from 10.8% in last week's note and adding another 2% on the week. The rebuild has been grinding rather than dramatic: bears have added shares consistently since September 24, with the position now sitting roughly 14% above where it was a month ago. None of this is coming from a tight borrow market. Availability is effectively unlimited, with shares to borrow vastly exceeding current short demand, and cost-to-borrow has actually eased to 0.35%, its lowest reading of the week after sitting closer to 0.54% earlier. Options positioning offers no additional read: the put/call ratio at 0.97 is barely a fraction of a standard deviation above its 20-day mean of 0.97 and carries a z-score near zero. Bears are adding by conviction, not because the borrow is cheap or puts are cheap, the market structure gives them no headwind either way.
The most interesting Street development this week is the split on price targets. BMO Capital's Keith Bachman, initiating this morning, raised his target to $295 from $235 while maintaining Outperform, a $60 lift that puts him near the top of the range. That contrasts with Amerx starting coverage today at Underweight with a $212 target, a level 20% below the current price of $265.44. Earlier in the week, TD Cowen and StoneX both lifted their targets, to $280 and $325 respectively, keeping Buy ratings. The consensus mean target is $238.97, which is actually 10% below the current price, reflecting a cluster of older and more cautious targets that have not yet been revised up. Morgan Stanley, the one bellwether name in the recent changes, raised to $254 from $238 on September 21, still well below where the stock is trading now. The bull case centres on Falcon Flex pipeline visibility, AIDR ARR nearly tripling sequentially, and long-term ARR targets of $10bn by FY30. The bear case points to endpoint saturation, lingering customer trust damage from the July 2024 outage, and competitive pressure from PANW, S, and Microsoft.
CEO George Kurtz sold just over $2.7 million of stock across Monday and Thursday last week, all under a pre-arranged 10b5-1 plan and at prices in the $269 to $274 range. The plan designation matters: these are scheduled sales, not discretionary reactions to the price. Net insider selling over the past 90 days totals roughly $98.6 million across 371,000 shares, a pattern consistent with systematic profit-taking rather than a change in conviction. On the institutional side, FMR (Fidelity) added 16.9 million shares as of September 30, and JP Morgan Asset Management added 14.2 million, two of the more notable recent builds among the top fifteen holders. BlackRock and State Street also added in their most recent reporting periods.
Wikipedia attention for CrowdStrike is running well above its own recent norm, with a retail attention z-score of 1.93 based on a combination of English Wikipedia views and ORTEX page traffic. That reading is from September 15, so it predates the recent price spike, but it does suggest the company was already drawing above-average public interest before the October move.
The stock is up 25% over the past month but fell 4.8% on Wednesday to $265.44, and the next earnings print is scheduled for December 1. Between now and then, the question is whether the gap between the current price and a consensus target sitting nearly 10% below it begins to close through fresh analyst revisions, or whether the continuing short rebuild starts to look like a more structural view against the valuation.
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