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Workday heads into its November 27 earnings date with short sellers stepping back sharply, even as the analyst community quietly marks down its price targets and the stock trades a tenth of a percent below where it started the week.
The most striking move in positioning this month has been the rapid unwinding of short interest. Bears held roughly 16.8 million shares short in early September. That figure has dropped to 12.6 million today, a fall of around 25% in six weeks, pulling short interest down to 5.8% of the free float. The retreat is a meaningful de-escalation: shorts that built aggressively through the summer have largely covered. Cost to borrow has ticked up 66% over the past week to around 0.50%, still cheap in absolute terms, and availability remains extremely loose at over 1,800% of short interest, meaning the lending pool is nowhere near stressed. The combination tells a consistent story: the borrow market is comfortable, and whoever is still short is not being squeezed out.
Options positioning reinforces the absence of urgency on either side. The put/call ratio is running at 0.67, almost exactly in line with its 20-day average of 0.67, and the z-score is flat at zero. This is about as neutral as options sentiment gets, neither defensive hedging nor aggressive call-buying. The 52-week range runs from 0.58 to 1.21, which puts current reads toward the call-biased end of the spectrum but without any real conviction in either direction. With the next print 44 days out, that apathy is probably rational.
The Street's direction of travel this week has been modestly negative. UBS cut its target on October 14, taking it from $220 to $210 while holding a Neutral rating. Jefferies did the same a week earlier, trimming from $220 to $210 with a Hold. Against a current price of $186, both targets imply meaningful upside on paper, but the direction of the moves matters: two target cuts in one week, both to the same figure, suggest a coordinated recalibration rather than idiosyncratic caution. The lone bullish outlier is Needham, which reiterated its Buy with a $230 target on October 5. The consensus sits at Hold with 19 Hold ratings and a mean target of $207.70, roughly 11.7% above the current price. Goldman Sachs, whose August move to $164 now looks like an outlier well below the current stock price, is the only stale data point worth flagging as potentially misaligned with current levels. The bears' core argument is concrete: flex credit pricing friction, an initial FY28 subscription revenue growth guide of 11% against a 11.7% consensus, and cRPO growth guided to 11-12% versus a 13.6% expectation. Bulls counter with AI ARR approaching $600 million on over 200% growth, more than 5,500 customers using at least one organic agent, and F2Q27 operating margins of 31.1%.
Ownership data adds context. Co-founder David Duffield remains the dominant holder at roughly 14.8% of shares per institutional data, though his activist filing reflects a position of 19.0% as last disclosed in February, and his recent Form 4 filings from October 9 show continued plan-based sales totalling around $16 million across multiple tranches, all executed under a pre-arranged 10b5-1 plan. Plan sales are scheduled disposals rather than discretionary conviction moves, and the significance scores on the filings are low. Co-CEO Aneel Bhusri holds around 3.6% and added a modest 17,000 shares in his most recent filing. BlackRock increased its stake to 10% per its September filing. Hotchkis and Wiley, a value-oriented manager, lifted its disclosed stake from 5.1% to 6.3% as of August, one of the more directional moves among the institutional register. No 13D activists are on the register, and none of the 13G passive holders appear to be agitating for change.
The stock's last earnings print, reported August 27, produced a 7.3% gain the next day and an 8.5% gain over the following five days, a sharp positive reaction that helped compress the short position significantly over subsequent weeks. Whether the November print delivers a comparable result will depend on whether the cRPO trajectory stabilises, which the bears say is the single most important number to watch.
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