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Bending Spoons enters the final month before its November 13 earnings with the borrow market as tight as it gets and short sellers adding positions at a pace that has become one of the more striking stories in small-cap software this autumn.
The lending situation is effectively at a standstill. Availability on BSP has collapsed to just 0.18%, meaning for every 555 shares already on loan, barely one remains available to borrow. That is the tightest the market has been over the past 30 days, and the stock has been running at or near this level for most of October. Cost to borrow has cooled from its mid-week peak above 27% to 16.96% by Tuesday's close, still well above the 4 to 6% range that held through most of September. The broader short-building trend is hard to ignore: short shares have climbed from roughly 15.5 million at the start of September to 21.5 million now, a 42% increase over 30 days. The week-on-week rise of 5.2% came even as Tuesday saw a small pullback. With nothing left in the lending pool, any fresh short demand faces a structural barrier.
Options positioning has shifted in a direction that runs counter to the short-building story. The put/call ratio has eased to 1.86, almost one standard deviation below its 20-day average of 2.23. In a stock where the recent norm has been heavy put demand, the current reading is comparatively light on downside hedging. That's a notable divergence: shorts are rebuilding aggressively through the borrow market while options traders are, by their own recent standards, less defensive. The ORTEX short score confirms the pressure, sitting at 80.7, its highest reading over the past two weeks and up from 72.2 at the end of September.
The Street is split, and the split matters for how this tension resolves. Most of the analyst coverage initiated when BSP listed in late July, with a cluster of firms arriving at broadly constructive but cautious verdicts. Wells Fargo and Benchmark carry Buy-equivalent ratings with targets of $48 and $50 respectively. JP Morgan and Evercore sit at neutral-equivalent ratings with targets of $38 and $40. The most recent move came from B of A Securities, which trimmed its target from $39 to $36 while keeping an Underperform rating, putting it as the only explicit bear on the register. The mean target across covering analysts sits near $47.67, implying roughly 26% upside from Tuesday's $37.86 close. Whether that gap is an opportunity or a mirage is precisely what the short sellers appear to be betting on.
Ownership concentration is unusual even by founder-led company standards. The four co-founders, Luca Ferrari, Matteo Danieli, Luca Querella, and Francesco Patarnello, collectively hold just over 51% of shares as last reported. Among institutional holders, Baillie Gifford filed a Schedule 13G in August disclosing 15.2% of the class, and Durable Capital Partners filed its own 13G in July at 7.3%. Both are passive disclosures. More recently, T. Rowe Price and Capital Research each added fresh positions of roughly 3 million shares as of end-September, signalling some new institutional appetite at current levels. The insider transaction log shows a cluster of director-level option exercises in September, all at $1.24 per share and all small in dollar terms, nothing that reads as a directional signal.
Earnings history on BSP is brief but instructive. The August 13 print produced a one-day move of minus 19.7%, with the five-day outcome settling at minus 18.5%. The September 4 event saw a one-day fall of 6.3% and a five-day decline of 7.0%. Two data points is a thin sample, but both prints sent the stock lower. The next report is November 13, now 30 days away. Retail attention, as measured by Wikipedia page views and ORTEX stock-page traffic, was running nearly two standard deviations above BSP's own 90-day norm as of late September, a sign of elevated retail interest at a time when the borrow market is fully committed and the short score is at a recent high. The question heading into the November print is whether the stock's 14% rally this week has absorbed enough of the bearish thesis to ease the pressure, or whether the rebuilt short position is positioned precisely for another earnings-day move to the downside.
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