Fastly gained 31% in a week and 18% in a single session on May 5 — yet short sellers have barely moved, and that tension between a violent price recovery and a stubbornly elevated short base is the defining feature of this setup heading into a June 3 earnings date.
The stock closed at $32.36 on May 5, bouncing from a month that had started -3% in the hole. The immediate driver was an earnings print filed on May 6: no 1-day reaction figure is recorded in the history, but the price action speaks for itself. Closest peer DOCN ripped 40% on the day and 62% on the week. AKAM added 11% on the day and 24% on the week. NET was up 9% on the day and 17% on the week. FSLY's 18% single-session move was right in the middle of that range — a broad sector bid, not an idiosyncratic squeeze.
Short positioning has not capitulated despite the rally. SI % FF was 13.0% as of May 5, down only marginally from the recent high of 14.0% hit at the end of March. Over the past week the short base actually edged up 0.9%. That is not the behaviour of shorts covering en masse into the move. Borrowing conditions offer no squeeze catalyst to explain any urgency — cost to borrow is a modest 0.47%, down roughly 7% on the week and moving sideways for two months. Availability is ample relative to shorts already in the market, meaning there is no meaningful friction for adding or maintaining short positions. The ORTEX short score of 51.0 sits right at the midpoint and has drifted lower from 53.4 a week ago — consistent with a modestly softening but still present short conviction.
Options traders have shifted from defensive to neutral. The put/call ratio reached 1.24 in early April — near its 52-week high — when the broader market sold off and FSLY was languishing near $24. It has now unwound to 0.84, slightly below its 20-day average of 0.88 and less than half a standard deviation beneath it. That is not bullish options sentiment; it is closer to indifferent. The extreme defensive positioning of April has cleared, but call buyers have not yet stepped in to replace it.
The analyst backdrop is visibly stale relative to where the stock now trades. The consensus mean price target is $23.29 — more than $9 below the current price of $32.36. Most of the recent target lifts came after the February earnings report, when the stock was trading in the low-to-mid teens. Evercore ISI initiated with an Outperform and a $32 target as recently as April 14. Piper Sandler maintained Neutral and raised its target to $30 in early April. Both of those targets now look roughly in-line or below the current price. The prevailing Street rating remains Neutral-leaning, and the EPS surprise factor score ranks in just the 7th percentile — not the profile of a company consistently clearing the bar. EPS momentum over 90 days is strong at the 98th percentile, but that reflects the direction of estimate revisions rather than a history of beats.
The insider flow adds a cautious note. CEO Kip Compton sold shares across four transactions in mid-April at prices between $23.69 and $25.40 — all well below where the stock printed on May 5. The 90-day net insider position reflects roughly $16.6 million in net selling. These are routine plan-based sales rather than large-scale unloading, but they do confirm that even the CEO was not positioning for a near-term re-rating at the current levels.
The next catalyst is a confirmed earnings date of June 3. The last equivalent print, on May 6, produced the week's sharp move. The one before that, in February, sent the stock up 96% in a day following what the data describes as a meaningful positive surprise — establishing a pattern of violent binary reactions to results. With shorts holding near 13% of the float, borrow cheap, and analyst targets sitting $9 below the current price, the June print becomes a direct test of whether the re-rating is justified by fundamentals or runs ahead of them.
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