Robinhood Trails Peers on Price but Not on Short Pressure

Robinhood Markets fell 9.4% on the week to $85.68, slightly worse than the median decline of around 8% across its closest peers, but the positioning story is notably less bearish than that price move suggests.

Among the peer group, the damage was broadly shared. COIN dropped 9.7% and GEMI fell 11.7%, while BLSH suffered the steepest weekly loss at 20.7%. IBKR held up better, down 5.8%. GLXY was the outlier, gaining 15.4% on Tuesday alone. HOOD's weekly decline was modestly worse than the group median, but its 24% one-month drawdown is deeper than most peers, leaving the stock at a substantial discount to analyst targets.

Short interest has continued the compression trend that began in late October. Shorts now hold 4.4% of the free float, around 34.9 million shares, down roughly 1.2% on the week and continuing a retreat from the 41-million-plus plateau that defined the first three weeks of October. That plateau broke sharply in the final days of that month, as noted in prior ORTEX notes, and the decline has not reversed. The borrow market reflects the same picture. Availability is at 1,378%, meaning lenders hold roughly 14 shares available for every one currently borrowed, one of the loosest readings of the past year. Cost to borrow has eased to 0.39%, down from above 0.57% at the start of last week. There is no meaningful short squeeze pressure in this stock.

The analyst response to earnings last week was broad but measured. Every firm that updated cut its price target, with Goldman Sachs lowering from $145 to $128 and Barclays trimming from $132 to $115, both maintaining positive ratings. Cantor Fitzgerald made the largest reduction, dropping its target from $150 to $120 while keeping an Overweight. JP Morgan held at Neutral with a modest cut to $114. No firm downgraded the rating itself, only the number. The mean target now stands at $130, implying around 52% upside from the current price. That gap is wide enough to flag a valuation inconsistency worth noting: the stock has repriced sharply while analyst conviction on direction has not followed. The PE multiple has contracted by nine points over the past 30 days to 26.2x, and the price-to-book ratio has pulled back by 2.2 points to 6.1x. The 90-day EPS momentum factor ranks in the 92nd percentile, and the analyst recommendation divergence score sits at the 98th percentile, both consistent with a setup where the Street remains bullish while the market is testing that view.

Insider activity is worth noting in context. CEO Vladimir Tenev sold roughly $42.6 million of stock on October 5, all under a pre-arranged 10b5-1 plan, and co-founder Baiju Bhatt sold a further $5.2 million on October 21, also under a 10b5-1 plan. Planned sales carry less informational weight than discretionary ones. Bhatt's disclosed position stood at around 6% of shares at last report and Tenev at just under 6%. The 90-day net insider selling across all insiders totals roughly $119 million in value, the bulk of it from these two 10b5-1 programmes rather than unscheduled selling.

On the company's own data, ORTEX Alt Data shows Robinhood's Q2 buyback spend reached $414 million, up 234% year on year and the largest second-quarter buyback on record going back to 2024. Wikipedia page views are running at a z-score of 1.9 against the prior 90-day baseline as of early October, a sign of elevated retail attention, though none of the available datasets have been measured to lead the company's reported figures.

The stock reports next on February 10. The price level to watch is whether the current $85 to $86 range holds relative to where the peer group stabilises: HOOD's additional month-long underperformance versus peers suggests something idiosyncratic is in the price, and the width of the gap between current price and analyst targets makes the next trading update a natural point of re-evaluation.