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NVIDIA heads into the final six weeks before its November 25 earnings with the stock recovering Tuesday's 1% gain to $228.52, but still nursing a 4.5% weekly loss that has reopened the gap to analyst targets and pushed options traders back toward hedging mode.
The most concrete shift this week is in options positioning. The put/call ratio climbed to 0.99 on Tuesday, above its 20-day average of 0.94 and the highest reading in about a fortnight. That is not an extreme by NVDA standards, the 52-week high sits at 1.10, and the z-score of 0.72 keeps this well inside normal territory. But the direction matters: after spending most of September with the PCR comfortably below 0.90, the options market has twice in the past two weeks pushed above 1.0. Traders are paying more for downside protection than they were a month ago.
Short interest is moving the same way, though the absolute level still warrants some perspective. At 1.28% of the free float as of Tuesday, short positions are low in any historical comparison. What has changed is the pace. SI has risen roughly 6% over the past week and 11% over the past month, a steady accumulation rather than a single-session spike. The borrow market offers no friction to this trade: availability is effectively unconstrained, and cost to borrow is running at just 0.28%, near a one-month low despite the recent uptick in borrowed shares. There is no squeeze dynamic here. Bears can add positions without difficulty, and current conditions give them no reason to cover in a hurry.
The Street remains constructively positioned, but with enough distance from the current price to keep the debate alive. The mean analyst target of $329 implies roughly 44% upside from Tuesday's close, a gap that has been a persistent feature of this note for several weeks. Analyst activity since late August has been uniformly positive in direction: JP Morgan raised its target to $320 after the August earnings beat, Bernstein lifted to $400, Citigroup and Mizuho both moved to $315. Piper Sandler initiated with an Overweight at $300 in September. None of the recent changes have been cuts. The bull case centres on broadening demand from hyperscalers and AI labs, a full-stack software moat via CUDA, and a roadmap that includes Vera Rubin in full production. The bear case is harder to dismiss than it was: Huawei's AI chip shipments reportedly doubled in China to 28% market share, only around 5% of the 135 GW of announced AI capacity is live, and power and permitting delays could push GPU order recognition further out. The EV/EBITDA multiple sits at 13.1, down modestly over 30 days, while the price-to-book of 11.2 reflects the premium the market still attaches to NVIDIA's growth profile. EPS momentum scores are strong, ranking in the 79th to 80th percentile on both 30-day and 90-day horizons.
The insider register is one-directional but largely mechanical. Net disposals over the past 90 days total roughly $968 million in value. Director Mark Stevens sold 1.37 million shares in mid-September outside a 10b5-1 plan, the most notable discretionary transaction in the recent window. Most other sales, including those by CFO Colette Kress and General Counsel Timothy Teter, were made under pre-arranged 10b5-1 plans and carry lower signalling weight. CEO Jensen Huang's 860 million share holding edged down by 391,000 shares, a negligible fraction of his total position. On the institutional side, the additions flagged in the October 5 note have not reversed: BlackRock, FMR and State Street all added shares as of September 30 and remain the three largest external holders.
The last earnings print, delivered August 26, produced a 7% next-day gain and a 5.3% five-day move, the kind of reaction that keeps options premiums elevated into each cycle. With 42 days until the November 25 report, the next six weeks will be defined by two questions: whether the competitive pressure from Huawei and domestic Chinese AI chips shows up in any demand signals, and whether announced AI capacity starts converting into live deployments at a pace that supports the forward earnings consensus. The short score has nudged to 30.3, its highest reading of the past two weeks, and the direction of both that score and the put/call ratio is worth tracking as November draws closer.
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