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JD.com heads into its November 12 earnings with short sellers cutting positions at a notable pace, while options traders have turned more bullish than they have been all year.
The clearest development in the lending market is how quickly shorts have stepped back. Short interest has fallen 14.4% over the past week and is down 16.6% over the past month, leaving borrowed shares at roughly 18.8 million. Borrow conditions reinforce the retreat: cost to borrow has halved over the week to just 0.25%, its lowest level in the 30-day window, and availability has ballooned to over 2,000% of short interest, meaning the lending pool is exceptionally loose relative to the number of shares borrowed. The 52-week peak for availability was 79.7%, so the current reading represents an enormous opening-up of the borrow market. There is no squeeze pressure here; if anything, the data describes a market where shorting JD is cheap and easy, yet fewer participants are choosing to do it.
The options market tells a more interesting story. The put/call ratio has dropped to 0.59, almost 2.7 standard deviations below its 20-day average of 0.65, placing it close to the most call-heavy extreme of the past year. That is a sharp turn toward bullish positioning in the options book. The move is notable because it comes at a time when the stock itself has done very little: JD closed at $26.78, up just 1.1% on the week and down 1% over the past month. Options traders are leaning into calls on a stock that has barely moved, which implies they are positioning for a catalyst rather than chasing momentum.
The Street remains broadly constructive but has been trimming targets. Barclays maintained its Overweight rating this week but cut its target from $41 to $38. Bank of America did the same on Tuesday, holding its Buy but moving from $38 to $37. Both cuts are modest and direction-of-travel adjustments rather than conviction changes. The consensus still reads Buy, with 23 buy-rated analysts. Bulls point to JD's top-line momentum: net revenue of RMB 301 billion last quarter, up 15.8% year-on-year and above consensus by RMB 11 billion, with supermarket growth and user gains doing the heavy lifting. Bears focus on margin. FY25 net profit margin forecasts have been revised down to 3.9%, squeezed by subsidy costs and thinner order density relative to peers. On valuation, the stock trades on a trailing PE of 6.8 and a price-to-book just below 1.0, both historically modest for a business of this scale. JD scores in the 96th percentile on earnings surprise and the 76th percentile on forward EPS growth, but analyst recommendation momentum is near the bottom of the universe at the 5th percentile, a sign the Street's direction has been more negative than positive recently.
Founder Richard Qiangdong Liu holds 12.5% of shares as last disclosed in a May 2025 Schedule 13G filing. BlackRock has been building, moving from 4.9% to 5.3% as of its July 2026 13G amendment. Neither represents an activist posture, and the standard caveat applies: positions are as last disclosed around the 5% threshold and can change without further filing. Recent insider activity, all options exercises and tax-withholding sales, carries no directional signal; the transactions are compensation mechanics rather than discretionary trading.
Earnings history adds a note of caution for the November 12 print. The most recent full report, filed in August, sent the stock down 8.1% on the day and 7.0% over the following week. The quarter before that saw a 2.7% decline on the day before recovering to flat on the five-day view. The pattern of negative initial reactions is the context against which the current bullish options tilt is playing out, making whether the November print can reverse that trend the key question for the weeks ahead.
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