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GEF has attracted three converging signals at once. Raymond James lifted its rating to Outperform this morning. Short interest has more than doubled in a month. And options traders are the most bullish they have been in weeks.
Raymond James analyst Matt Roberts upgraded GEF to Outperform from Market Perform today, setting a $90 price target against a current price of $80.04. That implies roughly 12% upside to the new target. The consensus mean sits at $87.60. Truist Securities, which kept a Hold rating last week, trimmed its own target to $94 from $97. Wells Fargo remains at Equal-Weight with a $90 target. The Raymond James upgrade is the first bullish rating change in recent history and arrives just as short sellers have been piling in.
Short interest as a percentage of free float has risen to 8.0%, up from around 3.8% a month ago. That is a 108% increase over 30 days and a 22% jump in the past week alone, the highest level since late August. The sharp build happened quickly: shares short rose from roughly 992,000 at the start of September to just over 2.07 million as of October 14.
Despite that pace, the borrow market is not stressed. Availability stands at 592%, meaning there are nearly six shares available to borrow for every one already borrowed. Cost to borrow is 0.47%, described as low. Shorts can add positions without paying a squeeze premium.
The put-call ratio on October 15 was 0.58, sitting 2.3 standard deviations below its 20-day mean of 0.83. Call buying has sharply outpaced put buying over the past week. The PCR had been running close to 0.86 through early October before dropping sharply after October 12, the same period in which the Raymond James upgrade was being anticipated or positioned for. The 52-week range on the PCR runs from 0.13 to 2.54, putting current readings in the lower third.
EPS momentum scores rank at the 85th percentile over both 30-day and 90-day windows. The dividend score ranks at the 96th percentile. The ORTEX short score has ticked up to 55.5 from around 50.8 two weeks ago, moving in line with the short interest build. Earnings are due November 3, 18 days away, which adds a near-term catalyst to watch on both sides.
BlackRock added 309,000 shares as of September 30. American Century added 330,000 shares over the same period. Both builds took place during the same window in which short interest began its sharp climb.
What to watch: whether the Raymond James upgrade draws additional broker coverage changes ahead of the November 3 earnings print, and whether the short position, now at an eight-week high, begins to unwind or extend further into the report.
See the live data behind this article on ORTEX.
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