SPS Commerce heads into its Q1 2026 earnings release today with short sellers adding positions for the fourth week running and a string of painful post-earnings drops sitting fresh in the record.
The short-side rebuild is measured but deliberate. Short interest has climbed to 7.2% of the free float — up roughly 6% over the past week and at its highest level of the past six weeks. The move accelerated after April 23, when estimated shares short jumped by nearly 150,000 in a single session. At just over 1.1 days to cover, the position is not large enough to threaten a squeeze, and the borrow market remains loose: availability is wide, cost to borrow holds near 0.35%, and the 52-week peak for availability tightness was only ever 5.6%. What the build does signal is that short sellers are specifically timing re-entry around an earnings event — not a macro drift.
The options market is less aggressively positioned than the short interest data alone might suggest. Call-side dominance is the story: the put/call ratio is running at 0.22, barely above its 20-day mean of 0.19 and a long way below its 52-week high of 1.44. The z-score of 1.13 marks a modest tick higher in put demand over the past two weeks, but the overall options skew still leans bullish. That divergence — shorts building while options traders stay call-heavy — is the key tension going into today's print.
The Street has been pulling targets lower for months. The most recent move came from Rothschild & Co on April 16, a downgrade from Buy to Neutral with the target slashed from $100 to $60. That's notable: at $55.18, the stock is already trading below that revised target. Before that, a wave of cuts followed the February earnings release — Citigroup, Stifel, and DA Davidson all trimmed, and the consensus mean target now sits around $79. That implies roughly 43% upside on paper, but the gap between current price and target reflects how far and fast the stock has fallen rather than a specific bullish view; SPSC is down 38% year-to-date. The ORTEX short score is a moderate 42.9, sitting at the 34th percentile — not a high-conviction bearish setup, but edging higher through April.
The bear case is grounded in recent fundamentals. The last two earnings releases produced next-day declines of 5.6% and 7.2% respectively, while the February print triggered a 9.7% one-day fall and a 14.9% loss over five days. The first sequential drop in recurring revenue customer count since early 2024 spooked the market then, and the question of whether that trend reversed is the crux of today's release. Revenue came in at the low end of guidance in Q4, and guidance for fiscal 2025 was trimmed — the Carbon6 integration remains the wildcard. Bull-side support rests on 16% revenue growth and a 71.2% gross margin — metrics that, if sustained, argue the selloff has been overdone. RSI at 45.5 is roughly neutral, offering no technical signal either way.
Insider activity adds a layer of colour without changing the fundamental picture. CEO Chad Collins, CFO Kim Nelson, and CTO Jamie Thingelstad all sold shares in February near current price levels — routine plan-driven activity by the look of the trade sizes, with the CEO's combined sales totalling around $785,000. The net 90-day insider position is a modest positive on shares but not the kind of cluster buying that would stand out as a contrarian signal into a declining stock. Neuberger Berman added 187,000 shares as of March 31, the largest active-manager move in the top-holder list; BlackRock and Vanguard trimmed fractionally.
The pattern to watch is whether today's revenue and customer-count numbers break the streak of disappointments — given that the last three prints all moved the stock sharply lower, the magnitude of any reaction, not just the direction, will tell traders whether the re-rating is complete or still in progress.
See the live data behind this article on ORTEX.
Open SPSC on ORTEX →ORTEX Market Intelligence content is generated by AI from a snapshot of ORTEX's proprietary data. Content is informational only and does not constitute investment advice.
