GameStop heads into the week of June earnings with a notable divergence: short sellers have covered aggressively over the past month, but options traders just flashed the most defensive signal of the year.
The options setup is the week's sharpest data point. The put/call ratio surged to 0.51 on Tuesday — more than three standard deviations above its 20-day mean of 0.30, the highest z-score reading in the past year and well above the PCR's prior 52-week peak of 0.81. For a stock where call-buying has been the dominant positioning trade for most of the past year, a sudden rotation toward puts represents a meaningful shift in sentiment. The timing lines up with a 7.7% weekly drop to $22.37, the stock's worst week in recent memory.
Short interest, by contrast, tells a less aggressive story. At roughly 16% of free float (14.6% on the broader float calculation), the position is substantial — but it has been drifting lower. Estimated shorts fell 6.2% over the week to around 65.3 million shares, continuing a pullback from the 70 million-share peak touched in early May. The 30-day trend is up just 2.9%, meaning the medium-term rebuild has been modest. Borrow conditions support that read: cost to borrow is running at only 0.92%, up about 28% over the month but well off recent highs above 1.37% seen earlier this month. Availability has tightened meaningfully from the 100% 52-week peak — the lending pool is not fully under pressure, but it is far from loose, with utilisation around 66%. The ORTEX short score of 78 places GME in the top tier of the universe, consistent with a stock that carries a structurally heavy short base.
Wall Street coverage of GameStop remains thin and uniformly bearish — the only active analyst on record has maintained an Underperform rating with a $13.50 target since at least mid-2025, a level well below the current price. That target gap is large enough to flag as a stale or structurally dissenting view rather than current consensus. The valuation data in the snapshot is also historical and pre-dates the company's balance sheet transformation, so it adds little to the current picture. Ryan Cohen's January purchases of one million shares for just over $21 million remain the most recent significant ownership event on record. Those buys, executed across two days at prices between $21 and $21.60, put him in the top spot on the holder list at 8.6% of shares. Board director Alain Attal added a further 24,000 shares at similar prices in the same window. With net insider buying totalling roughly $22 million over the past 90 days, the ownership signal is clearly constructive — but the trades are now four months old and the stock has barely moved from those entry prices.
The June 9 earnings date is therefore the natural focal point for positioning heading into the next week. The most recent prior print, in late March, produced just a 0.2% one-day move — virtually no reaction. The December 2025 print was more notable, sending the stock down 5.4% on the day. Neither instance suggests GME reliably makes large moves around results. With shorts partially covered, options skewing defensively at an extreme reading, and the stock down 3.7% over the past month, the question into the June report is whether the sharp single-day PCR spike reflects a genuine repricing of downside risk — or a short-lived hedge around a catalyst that historically hasn't delivered large moves.
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