ALRM Short Interest Climbs to Year High Before Thursday's Earnings

Alarm.com Holdings closes October with short interest at its highest level in at least a year, up 10% over the past month to 6.3% of free float, even as the stock has gained 20% over the same period.

That divergence between price and positioning is the tension worth watching. Short sellers have been adding steadily since late September, with the ORTEX daily estimate reaching 3.15 million shares this week. The week-on-week increase of nearly 5% is the steepest monthly acceleration in the trailing 30-day window. Yet the borrow market tells a different story: cost to borrow is just 0.57%, near the low end of its 30-day range, and availability is exceptionally loose at 2,490%, meaning there are roughly 25 shares available to lend for every one currently borrowed. Shorts are adding, but not under any supply pressure. The options market has shifted slightly more cautious. The put/call ratio moved to 0.41 on Friday, about 1.7 standard deviations above its 20-day mean of 0.34. That is not extreme, but the move is directional and has accelerated in the final days of October. With earnings due Thursday, November 5, the timing of both the short build and the options shift is notable.

The Street is split, though the weight of institutional opinion leans cautious. JP Morgan reiterated Underweight on Friday, lifting its target from $40 to $50. That is a meaningful upgrade in the target, but the rating leaves ALRM still underwater relative to consensus. The mean analyst price target is $65, essentially in line with the current price of $64.86. Barclays has maintained Equal-Weight with a $60 target through several rounds of revisions in 2026. Raymond James carries a Strong Buy with an $80 target, though that note is from May 2025 and should be treated as stale context rather than current conviction. Goldman Sachs last acted in April 2025 with a Neutral and a $58 target, also dated. The forward earnings yield factor ranks in the 62nd percentile, the EV/EBITDA multiple has expanded by roughly 0.25 turns over the past 30 days to 14.4x, and the PE ratio has moved up nearly 4 points over the same window to 21.9x. Valuation has drifted higher alongside the stock, which tightens the margin for the print on Thursday.

Retail attention has picked up ahead of the report. The Wikimedia Foundation's Wikipedia view data shows a z-score of 2.37 versus the company's own 90-day history, one of the higher readings in the tracked window. That points to a spike in public interest around the name. Neither dataset in ORTEX's alt data coverage for ALRM has been measured as a leading indicator for the company's reported figures, so the attention signal is colour rather than a read on the quarter.

Institutional ownership is concentrated. BlackRock held 19.3% of shares as of September 30, having added 355,000 shares in the period. State Street added 152,000 shares over the same window. Disciplined Growth Investors, a name worth watching, raised its stake from 6.6% to 7.3% in an August 13G/A filing. No holder on the 13D/G register has filed with activist intent. All positions are as last disclosed around the 5% reporting threshold; a holder dropping below 5% need not file again. On the insider side, CEO Stephen Trundle exercised and sold 50,000 shares in late August under a pre-arranged 10b5-1 plan, a mechanical transaction rather than a discretionary one. The CFO made two smaller open-market sales in the summer, neither large enough to shift the read materially. Net insider activity over the 90 days to September 2 ran to roughly -$3.8 million in value, nearly all attributable to the CEO's plan-driven sale.

The prior quarterly print, reported August 6, moved the stock just 1.5% the following day and gave back that gain over the subsequent week. With short interest now at a year high, a loose borrow market, and the JP Morgan target still 23% below the current price, the key question on Thursday is whether the revenue growth trajectory justifies a multiple that has expanded materially through October.