QXO heads into its May 5 Q1 earnings report with bears making one of their most aggressive pre-earnings moves in the stock's short history.
Short interest has surged 35% over the past month, reaching 12.4% of the free float — a level that ranks in the bottom 1st percentile of the entire universe by short score rank. The ORTEX short score hit 78.1 on April 30, its highest reading of the past year, driven by a 24% week-on-week jump in shares short. That pace of accumulation — from roughly 65 million shares short in late March to nearly 90 million today — signals a deliberate, sustained build rather than a single-day positioning event. The borrow market has tightened alongside it: cost to borrow spiked from under 0.5% in early April to a recent high of 5.5% before easing back to 3.3% — a more-than-sixfold rise in a month. Availability has contracted to 32%, leaving only one share available for every three already borrowed, and placing the borrow market in firmly tight territory heading into the print. The stock closed at $19.82, down 5.5% on the week.
Options positioning adds another layer of caution. The put/call ratio is running at 0.61, about 1.2 standard deviations above its 20-day average of 0.49 — the highest defensive tilt in several weeks, though well short of the 52-week extreme of 0.83. That pattern looks less like panic and more like measured hedging: investors are buying incremental downside protection without going fully defensive. Historical reactions offer some context for the anxiety. The three most recent post-earnings prints all produced losses — the stock fell roughly 4%, 5%, and 3% on the day following each of the last three results, with 5-day moves of -8.7%, -7.5%, and -2.9% respectively. Only one of the past four events produced a positive outcome.
Analysts have not abandoned the stock, but they are selectively cautious about price. Oppenheimer and Keybanc both lifted targets to $32 in April, maintaining positive ratings through the turbulence. RBC Capital went the other direction, trimming its target to $28 while holding Outperform. The Street consensus implies roughly 65% upside from current levels to a mean target of $32.64, reflecting the gap between where the stock trades and where analysts see fair value. Bulls point to QXO's acquisition pipeline — the pending TopBuild addition is expected to substantially expand revenue and free cash flow — and to CEO Brad Jacobs' track record of accretive consolidation in distribution verticals. Bears counter that the growth story leans heavily on deal-making and integration execution, and that current acquisition multiples of roughly 7-8x post-synergy leave limited room for disappointment if synergies are delayed or the construction cycle softens. Noteworthy on the ownership side: Morgan Stanley Investment Management added 11.6 million shares in Q1 2026, making it the second-largest disclosed institutional holder at 7.8% — a meaningful vote of confidence that partially offsets the short buildup.
The May 5 print is a test of whether QXO's deal economics are converting to cash flow on the schedule the Street has priced in, or whether integration friction is outrunning the acquisition momentum.
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