Coinbase Global enters the back half of May with a curious split: the stock is up 5% on the week and 24% over the past month, yet short sellers have spent the same period quietly adding to their positions.
Short interest jumped to 11.8% of the free float by May 12, up from under 11% at the start of the month. That is the highest reading since late March, and the rebuild of roughly 1.8 million shares in a single week — after shorts had compressed toward 10.5% in mid-April — suggests some participants view the recent rally as a selling opportunity rather than a momentum confirmation. At $207.64, COIN gave back 4.1% on Tuesday alone. The borrow market, however, is not signalling a crowded short. Cost to borrow has eased to 0.37%, down roughly 29% over the past month, and availability remains relaxed — only about a quarter of the lendable pool has been drawn on. There is no squeeze pressure here. Options positioning is a different story: the put/call ratio jumped to 0.73, nearly 1.8 standard deviations above its 20-day average of 0.66. That is not yet at its 52-week high of 0.90, but it marks a clear shift in sentiment over the past two weeks, with more defensive hedging layered on top of the price recovery.
The Street reaction to Q1 earnings — reported May 7, with the stock moving just 1.6% on the day — has been a broadly coordinated target cut. JP Morgan kept its Overweight but trimmed to $283 from $290. Barclays, already at Underweight, slashed its target to $107 from $140. Piper Sandler and HC Wainwright both lowered while holding their respective Neutral and Buy ratings. Mizuho was the outlier, raising its Neutral target to $200 from $170 — still below the current price. The mean target across the Street sits at $231, implying roughly 11% upside from Tuesday's close, a modest cushion given how compressed that figure has become after a month of cuts. The bull case rests on Coinbase's evolution beyond transaction fees: derivatives platform scale, stablecoin growth, and tokenized equities positioning. The bear case is simpler — revenues remain hostage to crypto trading volumes, and the regulatory and cyclical risks have not disappeared.
Institutional ownership is in steady hands. Vanguard holds just over 10% of shares, BlackRock 6.5%, with both adding modestly in the most recent quarter. ARK Investment Management trimmed its position slightly but remains a named holder. The stickier concern for near-term price action is the CFO's selling pattern: Alesia Haas sold $2 million of stock on April 16 and made two similar-sized sales in March, part of what appears to be a scheduled programme. The aggregate 90-day insider net figure, once the offsetting share grants are factored in, shows net selling of around $36.8 million in value — routine for executive compensation plans, but worth keeping in context alongside the short rebuild.
The next catalyst is a June 16 earnings date. The most recent comparable reaction — the April 30 print — produced a 5.2% one-day move and a 6.2% five-day drift. The May 7 event was far more muted at 1.6%, suggesting the market had already positioned around the headline numbers. With the short score running at 57 and options hedging picking up, the setup into June looks less like outright bearishness and more like a market hedging a stock that has already priced in a great deal of the good news.
The question heading into June is whether trading volumes in crypto hold up well enough to justify the PE multiple of 80x — a figure that has expanded by 33 points over the past month — or whether the target-cut cycle across the Street has further to run.
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