The Trade Desk reports Q1 2026 results today with short sellers running at their most exposed in months — and the CEO already on record with a $112 million bet on the stock's recovery.
Short interest is the headline tension here. It climbed 43% over the past month to reach 16.6% of free float — a level that puts TTD firmly in the heavily-shorted category for a large-cap adtech name. That build was sharp: shorts added roughly 20 million shares between early April and late April, roughly coinciding with the period following the February earnings miss and the public fallout with Publicis. Yet the lending market is relaxed about all of it. Cost to borrow is running below 0.4% — almost negligible — and availability remains loose, with the borrow pool far from exhausted despite that positioning build. Bears have been comfortable adding here; they haven't had to compete for stock to short. The ORTEX short score of 55 sits in a range consistent with moderate-to-elevated pressure, though well below crisis territory.
Options positioning has grown slightly more cautious into today's print. The put/call ratio climbed to 0.56 — nearly two standard deviations above its 20-day average of 0.52 — suggesting incremental demand for downside protection. That's still well below the 52-week high of 0.93, so this is a tilt toward caution rather than a wall of fear. The stock is down about 2% on the day ahead of the release, broadly in line with peers: fell 2.7% and dropped 2.5%, though was an outlier, cratering more than 21% on the session. The sector mood is clearly fragile.
The bull case rests on TTD's structural position in programmatic advertising and its 12-month forward EPS estimate momentum, which ranks in the 87th percentile of the broader universe — a signal that consensus still sees meaningful earnings growth ahead despite the recent turbulence. The mean analyst price target is around $30, roughly 30% above yesterday's close of $23.49, and the consensus remains a buy from 14 analysts. Most of the target-price trimming happened in the weeks following the February results: UBS cut from $44 to $31 in late April while keeping its Buy rating, and several others made smaller reductions. The Street has rerated the stock lower but not abandoned it. Bears counter with a genuine list of operational concerns — a worsening relationship with Publicis, alleged audit misconduct with WPP and Dentsu, a CFO change, and the dual-class structure that concentrates effective control with founder Jeff Green. Margin compression in recent quarters gives the bear case additional grounding.
The ownership picture adds an interesting wrinkle. Green bought roughly $112 million of TTD shares in early March at prices between $23.49 and $25.08 — a concentrated, public commitment at levels close to where the stock trades today. That's not a small signal from a founder-CEO. But it also raises the stakes: the market treated March's purchases as stabilising at the time, and the stock has struggled to build meaningfully on them. Net insider buying across all insiders totals around $153 million over the past 90 days, almost entirely driven by Green's purchases.
The Q1 print is therefore less a test of whether The Trade Desk's model works than a test of whether management can demonstrate that the agency relationship disruptions are contained — and that the revenue trajectory still justifies a stock that remains, on the ORTEX short score, in territory where a meaningful portion of the market is actively positioned for further downside.
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