Similarweb enters the week after its Q1 earnings in an unusual position: short sellers have just staged a dramatic exit while options traders are the most bullish they've been all year.
The most striking development is the near-collapse of short positions. Short Interest % of Free Float fell from around 1.4% in mid-April to just 0.54% now — a drop of more than 53% in a single week and over 60% across the past month. This is not a gradual drift; the bulk of the unwind happened in just two sessions between May 8 and May 11, when estimated short shares roughly halved overnight. With borrowing costs barely above 0.5% annually and availability running at over 3,600% of outstanding short interest — meaning the lending pool dwarfs what's actually borrowed — there is no mechanical pressure forcing these covers. Shorts chose to leave.
Options positioning tells the same directional story, but more forcefully. The put/call ratio has collapsed to 0.19, its lowest reading in the past 52 weeks. Against a 20-day mean of 0.45, the current reading is more than one standard deviation below average. Call volume has overwhelmed puts. The market is not hedging here — it is leaning long. That shift came immediately on the heels of Q1 results published May 13, which followed a prior earnings print on May 5 that produced a modest +1.7% one-day gain and a clean +3.3% five-day follow-through.
The Street is a more complicated picture. Analyst sentiment has been predominantly negative since the February 18 earnings, when the stock fell 34% in a single session. Multiple firms downgraded at that point — Needham moved to Hold, William Blair to Market Perform, and Citigroup to Neutral in April, slashing its target from $8.50 to $3.00. Barclays held its Overweight rating in April but cut its target from $7 to $5. The mean analyst price target of around $4.17 compares to the current price of $3.12, implying roughly 34% upside in consensus — but those targets are stale by several weeks and the direction of travel has been firmly downward. The bear case centres on slowing growth, declining net dollar retention, and rising competitive pressure in digital analytics. Bulls point to Similarweb's position as the dominant multi-channel intelligence platform, arguing that the worst of the customer churn and downsell cycle is passing. The EV/EBITDA multiple has eased to around 8.2x, and the PE stands near 14.5x — neither extreme. EPS momentum ranks in the 33rd percentile on a 30-day basis, falling to the 21st percentile over 90 days, which reflects the Street's still-cautious earnings revisions.
Ownership is concentrated and largely sticky. Prosus Ventures and Viola Group together control around 25% of shares. Wellington Management added over 540,000 shares in Q1 and Centerbook Partners added 364,000. Those are small managers building, not institutional distribution. The ORTEX short score has eased to 26.9 from a recent high of 32.7 at the end of April — moving in the direction of less bearish positioning — and the short score factor ranks in the 92nd percentile, meaning the stock scores well relative to peers on short-side metrics.
The stock has gained 34% over the past month but pulled back 2.2% this week to $3.12. Correlated peers had a rough week: ASAN fell 18%, WK dropped 15%, and DCBO lost nearly 14% — making SMWB's modest dip look relatively resilient. The next catalyst to watch is how the May 13 earnings numbers read on closer inspection and whether analyst targets are revised in the days ahead — the gap between the February sell-off narrative and the current options-market enthusiasm is the tension that frames the rest of May.
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