RELX Bullish Options Bet Holds Into Thursday's Print

RELX reported Q3 revenue of $2.84bn, up 8% year over year, just over a week ago. The stock rose 5.1% on that day and added another 11.8% over the following five days. Now it reports again on Thursday, and the options market is running the same playbook it ran before that beat.

The put/call ratio closed Monday at 0.20, fractionally above the 0.19 reading that preceded the October 23 release and still 1.5 standard deviations below the 20-day mean of 0.53. That gap from the mean is narrower than it was going into the last print, when the PCR was more than four standard deviations below average, but the direction is identical. Call positioning dominates by a wide margin. The stock has added 2.4% on the week to $40.18, though it pulled back 0.9% on Monday, a routine consolidation after a 20% monthly gain.

The lending market is, if anything, more relaxed than it was before the last print. Borrow availability has loosened to 554%, up from 442% at the time of the previous preview, meaning there are now more than five shares available to borrow for every one already lent out. Cost to borrow ticked up to 0.82% on Thursday but remains well below 1%, and short interest has barely moved, edging up roughly 2% on the week to around 6.3 million shares. The ORTEX short score has eased from 38.5 two weeks ago to 35.1 now, consistent with shorts trimming rather than pressing. There is no sign of a position being built against the stock.

The most material pre-print analyst move came from Citigroup, which downgraded RELX to Neutral from Buy on October 20, just days before the last earnings release. That call has not aged well given the stock's subsequent 20% monthly gain. No other recent analyst action carries price targets in the data, so the precise valuation debate is harder to pin down. What is clear is that the stock now trades at a P/E of roughly 23.8 times and an EV/EBITDA of 16.8 times, with both multiples broadly flat over the past month after the rally. Barclays upgraded to Overweight in March 2025 and Goldman Sachs moved to Buy in October 2023, giving the stock a broadly positive longer-term analyst backdrop against which Citi's recent step down to Neutral stands as the lone recent dissent.

Thursday's release will test whether the raised full-year guidance RELX issued with Q3 results can be backed by further margin progress, or whether the Citi downgrade identified a valuation ceiling that even a strong print cannot clear.