Celsius Holdings heads into its May 28 earnings print with short sellers aggressively rebuilding positions while the options market tells the opposite story — a rare and charged divergence for a stock already down 15% this month.
The short side has been accelerating hard. Short interest climbed 14.6% in the past week alone, bringing it to 12.5% of the free float — the highest reading in at least 30 days and up from roughly 11.2% at the start of the week. That is a meaningful level. More than one share in every eight in circulation is now held short. The ORTEX short score has been climbing steadily, reaching 63.5 on May 12 from 59.3 at the start of the month, placing it in territory that suggests above-average short conviction. The move is consistent with the price action: CELH is down 11.7% over the week and 15% over the month, closing at $29.61 — about 45% below where it traded just two months ago.
The lending market, however, offers no amplification to that bearish positioning. Borrow is practically free at 0.45%, and availability has been loosening rather than tightening: the borrow pool is far from exhausted, with no supply squeeze anywhere in the data. That combination — shorts at a 30-day high but borrow costs near zero — suggests the expansion is orderly. These are not emergency shorts scrambling for expensive shares. They are building deliberate, low-cost positions.
Options positioning flatly contradicts the short-side setup. The put/call ratio is at 0.38 — not just below average but the lowest reading of the past 52 weeks, running almost 2.8 standard deviations below its 20-day mean of 0.44. Options traders are reaching for calls, not puts, at the precise moment short sellers are piling in. The contrast is stark and is the clearest signal in the data: the two audiences are reading the same story and arriving at opposite conclusions.
The Street broadly stays in the bull camp, though the conviction level is softening on the margin. JP Morgan raised its target to $70 after the early-May print while keeping Overweight, but Morgan Stanley trimmed to $55 from $64 the same day — both maintaining positive ratings, both recalibrating expectations. The consensus sits at buy, with a mean target of $62, still more than double the current price. That gap is not an endorsement of near-term momentum; it reflects a Street that sees a growth story intact but remains willing to watch it cheapen. On the fundamental side, EPS momentum ranks in the 78th–82nd percentile over 30 and 90 days, and the 12-month forward EPS growth rank is in the 92nd percentile — the underlying earnings trajectory has not broken down. Valuation has compressed sharply: the PE multiple has shed more than 2.7 turns over 30 days to 16.7x, and EV/EBITDA is down nearly a full turn to 11.7x. Cheap by recent standards, though the bears see those multiples as still demanding if growth decelerates further.
The most recent earnings event, reported May 8, produced a one-day decline of 10.6%. The next scheduled print is May 28. With shorts at a month-to-date high, options traders leaning heavily bullish, the stock approaching $30 for the first time since late 2023, and a high-conviction analyst base still calling for $60+, the May 28 release is shaping up as a genuine binary — the question is whether the growth numbers are strong enough to close the gap between the current price and where the Street says this stock should be.
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