Arm Holdings arrives at tonight's Q4 print riding a 40% gain over the past month — and the short side is conspicuously absent from the trade.
Short interest is running at 11.5% of the free float, modestly lower on the week and down from a brief peak above 16 million shares in late April. The borrow market has eased alongside it: cost to borrow is near its lowest level in six weeks at 0.43%, and availability in the lending pool is relatively comfortable. Bears who tried to build positions into the April tariff-shock lows have been steadily covering since. The short score, at 59, has drifted lower all week — a sign that aggregate short pressure is unwinding, not building, ahead of the report.
The options market tells a more ambivalent story. The put/call ratio is running at 1.17, broadly in line with its 20-day average of 1.20 and well within a normal range. What stands out is the structural context: ARM's PCR has spent most of the past six weeks above 1.1, with the 52-week high touching 1.35 during the April sell-off. The ratio has eased materially from those defensive extremes — a reflection of the stock's recovery — but it remains structurally put-heavy for a name that has just ripped 40% higher. Options traders are not pressing shorts, but they are not abandoning hedges either.
The analyst debate heading into the print captures the same tension between structural optimism and valuation caution. The bull case rests on a 20% royalty-revenue CAGR through fiscal 2031, driven by the Armv9 architecture ramp, custom compute silicon, and a total addressable market in cloud AI projected to grow from $330 billion to over $1.2 trillion. Wells Fargo lifted its target to $220 and Susquehanna to $210 in the past week, both reiterating positive ratings. But Goldman Sachs maintains a Sell with a $125 target, and Morgan Stanley downgraded to Equal-Weight in early April, raising its target to $150 while stepping away from the bull camp. The mean analyst target sits at $175 — already 16% below the current price of $208.84 — which means ARM has run past consensus. The P/E multiple has expanded by more than 20 points over the past 30 days to around 84x, with EV/EBITDA at 69x; the market is pricing Armv9 success with little room for execution slippage.
CEO Rene Haas has been a consistent seller over the past two months, with multiple transactions in late March and mid-April totalling well over $1.5 million in proceeds. CFO Jason Child sold $3.8 million of stock on April 22, at prices around $180 — some 15% below where the stock is trading now. The significance score on these trades is low, consistent with pre-scheduled plans, but the pattern of executive selling into a rising stock is worth noting as a backdrop to the print.
After the last two earnings releases, ARM moved sharply higher — 14.7% the day after the March 2026 Q3 report and 17.9% after the February 2026 Q2 print. The five-day follow-through after those two events averaged roughly 13% to the upside. Tonight's print tests whether a stock that has already priced in an AI-infrastructure supercycle can once again surprise a market that has moved well ahead of where analysts collectively stand.
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