NIQ shares shed 26.8% over the past week following earnings. Yet options traders are piling into calls at a historic rate.
The put-call ratio sits at 0.0424 — 2.3 standard deviations above the 20-day mean of 0.022. That means calls are overwhelming puts by a ratio of roughly 24-to-1. For a stock trading at $8.20, well below the mean analyst target of $15.27, the options positioning tells a story of buyers hunting for a floor.
Short sellers aren't pressing the move lower. SI fell 10.7% over the past week to 2.35% of free float — a modest level that has been declining steadily since April. Availability now stands at 173%, up sharply from roughly 85–95% in early May when the borrow market was tighter. More shares available to borrow means fewer shorts are competing for a finite pool.
Cost to borrow has also unwound its pre-earnings spike. CTB peaked at 0.84% APR on May 13 and has since dropped to 0.44%. The brief tightening around the earnings date has fully reversed.
Advent International holds 50.6% of shares. KKR holds a further 10.2%. That concentrated PE ownership limits the free float available to trade — context worth holding alongside the options and borrow data.
Smaller institutional holders are adding. Alamut Investment Management added 1.81 million shares in Q1. Select Equity Group added 488,000. Vanguard added 1.46 million. These are incremental moves, but they point in the same direction as the options positioning.
The most recent analyst note on record — Wells Fargo's Jason Haas maintaining Overweight in January — carried a $21 target, later trimmed to $21 from $23. The consensus target now sits at $15.27, implying 86% upside from current levels.
The ORTEX short score has pulled back from 66.6 on May 6 to 60.3 today. EPS momentum ranks in the 89th percentile over 90 days. Both moves are consistent with the broader pattern: short pressure easing, fundamental momentum holding up.
The next earnings event is scheduled for June 26.
Data summary
See the live data behind this article on ORTEX.
Open NIQ on ORTEX →ORTEX Market Intelligence content is generated by AI from a snapshot of ORTEX's proprietary data. Content is informational only and does not constitute investment advice.
