Leslie's, Inc. heads into Monday's May 18 event carrying one of the most violent short-squeeze setups in the specialty retail space right now.
The stock erupted 145% in a single session after the company's Q2 2026 print on May 13 revealed a revenue beat and traffic gains — a result that caught a heavily short book badly offside. Short interest had been running at roughly 11% of the free float, with about one million shares short heading into the release. That positioning proved costly. The ORTEX short score, which had been elevated around 70-74 over the prior two weeks, has now eased slightly to 69.9 — still signalling meaningful bearish conviction, but lower than the peak levels that preceded the print. Cost to borrow remains modest at 2.86%, and availability is loose at over 200% of short interest, meaning the lending market is not tight and there is no mechanical squeeze pressure building in the borrow pool.
Options traders are not pressing the euphoria. The put/call ratio is running at 0.54, barely a tenth of a standard deviation above its 20-day average of 0.53 — essentially neutral. That's a striking contrast to the scale of the price move. Far from signalling a momentum chase, options positioning reads as calm, almost indifferent to the rally. It's also worth noting how much the PCR has shifted over the past month: through April, calls dominated heavily with a PCR as low as 0.22, before snapping back above 0.54 as the stock approached earnings. That reversal suggests traders rotated out of the bullish call overhang once the event risk crystallised.
The analyst debate captures the same tension. Wolfe Research moved on May 14 — the day after the print — maintaining its Outperform rating and raising its target from $2 to $3. That's an incremental positive, but the new target is already below where the stock closed at $3.50. Mizuho, sitting at Neutral, trimmed its target to $3.50 the week before from $4.00. Morgan Stanley remains at Underweight. The bull case centres on Leslie's ability to recapture lost pool-service customers, grow its loyalty programme, and sustain the EBITDA margin improvement it has been signalling. Bears point to a structural demand problem — customer traffic was in multi-quarter decline, competes with big-box formats in a weather-sensitive category, and the revenue beat follows a period where the bar had been repeatedly lowered. With a market cap that has barely crossed $13 million and an EV/EBITDA ratio around 14.6x, the valuation now demands the turnaround be genuine, not seasonal.
The May 18 print — whether a follow-on management call or a formal earnings release — is therefore less about whether Leslie's can beat again and more about whether management's $1.1B–$1.25B full-year sales guidance is credible enough to hold a stock that has already doubled on one quarter's results.
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