Short sellers are as committed to WHR as they have been all year, with 20% of the free float sold short heading into today's Q2 earnings release.
The bear camp is not crowded in a panicked way — but it is persistent. Short interest climbed 4.3% over the past week to 11.2 million shares, equivalent to roughly 20% of the free float and 5.2 days to cover based on recent official FINRA data. What makes the setup more charged is how quickly borrowing costs have moved. The cost to borrow has tripled over the past month to 6.5% annualised — a sharp shift from the ~2% range that held through most of April. Borrow availability is in the tight range, at roughly 48% of short interest, meaning shorts have room to operate but the pool is not flush. The ORTEX short score reflects this: 70.8 out of 100, ranking in the 3rd percentile of the universe — a level that flags meaningful bearish conviction. Options, however, push in the other direction. The put/call ratio has dropped to 0.88, more than two standard deviations below its 20-day average of 0.92, reaching its most call-heavy configuration in at least a year. That divergence — shorts adding, options traders buying calls — captures the tension heading into the print.
The analyst community has spent the past several months cutting targets across the board. JP Morgan trimmed its target to $59 from $76 in March, while B of A — which carries an Underperform rating — cut to $50 from $60 in late April. Citigroup and Mizuho both initiated with Neutral ratings around the same time, at $60 and $55 respectively, bracketing the current price closely. The mean price target across the Street is $68, implying roughly 24% upside to the $54.73 close, but the direction of travel has been firmly downward. Goldman Sachs maintains the lone Buy-rated view with a $93 target — a large gap from the pack. Bears point to structurally weak appliance demand, the housing market drag, and a $5 billion net debt load that leaves little room for error on cash flow. Bulls counter that the stock trades on an EV/EBITDA of just 8.6x on a trailing basis, with an earnings yield near 9.5% and a dividend score that ranks in the 92nd percentile — a cheap stock generating cash, if volumes stabilise.
The two most recent earnings prints offer a mixed reference point. Last quarter, Q1 2026 results sent the stock down 3.3% on the day, though it recovered to close flat over the following five sessions. The quarter before that, WHR fell just over 1% on the day before bouncing 5.2% across the following week. Institutional ownership adds a subtle wrinkle: Appaloosa LP filed a new position of 3.2 million shares in early March, while Geode Capital added over 1.1 million shares recently — both suggesting that value-oriented money is accumulating even as short sellers press their case.
The print will test whether Whirlpool can defend margins against tariff headwinds and soft North American volumes at a price that already reflects a lot of pessimism — or whether the bear thesis on demand destruction finally gains numerical support.
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