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Options traders are piling into TDY puts at a rate not seen in months. The put/call ratio hit 0.794 on Wednesday, 4.3 standard deviations above its 20-day mean of 0.356. That is the clearest single signal in the current data. Earnings land on October 21.
The PCR has sat in a tight band around 0.33 for weeks. Wednesday's reading is more than double the recent average. The 52-week high is 1.559, so this is not an all-time panic print. But a z-score above 4 on any metric demands attention, and the timing five days before a quarterly report makes the positioning deliberate rather than incidental.
Put buying ahead of earnings can mean hedging, not outright bearishness. The analyst backdrop here is constructive. Every price target move on record over the past year is a raise. Needham kept its Buy and lifted to $760 in September. The consensus target is $758, against a current price of $619.91. Buyers of puts may simply be protecting gains rather than betting on a miss.
Short interest has climbed 20.4% over the past week to 2.35% of free float. That is a meaningful pace of increase. The absolute level is low. With availability sitting at 7,163% of short interest, the lending market is wide open. There is no shortage of shares to borrow and no squeeze dynamic building. The short score stands at 34, having nudged up from around 32 at the start of the month, consistent with the directional move in SI but still at an unremarkable absolute level.
Cost to borrow is 0.44%, up 51% over the past week. That sounds dramatic but the starting point was low. This remains a cheap and easy stock to borrow.
The bull case centres on Teledyne's 11 consecutive quarters of book-to-bill above 1.0x, a backlog near $5 billion, and accelerating defence demand in drones and counter-UAS systems. Adjusted EPS was $6.28 last quarter, with record gross margin of 44.4%.
The bear case is more structural: short-cycle contraction spreading into defence revenues, margin compression from lower fixed-cost absorption, and tariff and supply-chain risks that management has flagged repeatedly.
Retail attention is also ticking up. Wikipedia and ORTEX page views show a z-score of 1.43 versus TDY's own trailing 90-day average, a mild but notable uptick heading into the print.
See the live data behind this article on ORTEX.
Open TDY on ORTEX →ORTEX Market Intelligence content is generated by AI from a snapshot of ORTEX's proprietary data and reviewed by the ORTEX team. Content is informational only and does not constitute investment advice.
