Crawford Beats on Revenue but Misses EPS as Shorts Step Back
CRD.B heads into its Q1 2026 call this morning having already released its numbers — and the read is mixed.
Revenue came in at $320.1M, ahead of the $313.8M consensus. Adjusted EPS of $0.16, however, missed the $0.21 estimate by a wide $0.04 margin. The earnings-per-share shortfall is the headline number the market will be digesting in the session ahead. The stock closed at $9.48 on Monday, already down 6.5% over the past month and 1.9% on the week, having retreated from a 3-month high near $10.79 in mid-March.
The borrow market tells a story of unwinding pressure rather than building conviction. Short interest has collapsed roughly 50% over the past month to just 0.056% of the free float — so negligible as to be nearly irrelevant from a positioning standpoint. What's more striking is the pace of that unwind: shorts were cut nearly in half in a single week, falling 41% week-on-week. Availability remains very loose, with borrow extremely accessible. Cost to borrow has edged up to 5.8% from roughly 3% a week ago, but that move likely reflects the smaller pool of active borrows rather than any squeeze dynamic. The ORTEX short score of 28, placing the stock in the 82nd percentile for short score rank, points to short positioning that has become increasingly light.
Ownership is tightly concentrated. Jesse Crawford holds approximately 48% of shares. BlackRock, Vanguard, and Dimensional have all been modest buyers in the most recent quarter, each adding shares through March. The structure is more family-controlled than institutional, which limits the likelihood of large-fund pressure either way.
Analyst coverage on CRD.B is thin and dated — the most recent target on record is from Truist Securities in August 2023, when the stock was placed at $11 with a Buy rating. That data is too stale to carry weight here and is omitted accordingly. The Q1 print — a clean top-line beat paired with a meaningful bottom-line miss — is therefore the test of whether CRD.B's revenue momentum can be squared with a margin profile that has so far fallen short of where the Street expected it to land.
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