Caris Life Sciences heads into Thursday's earnings print with one strikingly unusual signal: options traders have turned their most bullish in months, even as the stock has been in freefall.
The clearest anomaly is the options setup. The put/call ratio has collapsed to 0.79 — more than three standard deviations below its 20-day average of 1.37, and the lowest reading in the past year. For most of the past month, PCR ran well above 1.30, reflecting heavy demand for downside protection. The abrupt reversal into calls-dominated flow suggests a pocket of traders is positioning for a bounce off the earnings print, not another leg lower.
That conviction takes nerve given the price action. CAI has fallen 28% over the past month to $14.55, including a 10% slide in the past week alone. The most recent comparable earnings event — the May 7 Q1 release — saw the stock drop 15.6% in a single session and extend losses to 20.3% over the following five days. The prior print in early May 2026 delivered an initial 4.7% gain before reversing to a 22.5% five-day loss. The pattern is not gentle. Peers have also softened — NTRA fell 5.4% and SANA slid 12.5% on the week — but CAI has consistently underperformed.
The lending market does not suggest a crowded short. Borrow availability has loosened sharply to 183%, up from roughly 97% at the end of April, meaning there is now far more capacity to borrow shares than there are shares already borrowed. Cost to borrow has also eased from above 1% in mid-April to just 0.66% — routine levels. Short interest is a moderate 4.2% of the free float, up about 5% on the week but broadly flat over the month. This is not a squeeze setup.
Analysts remain onside in rating but have been consistently trimming targets. JP Morgan and Citigroup both cut to $30 and $28 respectively on May 8 — after the prior earnings miss — while maintaining positive ratings. The bull case rests on the platform's breadth, spanning early cancer detection, MRD tracking, and therapy selection, plus growing reimbursement coverage. Bears point to the slower-than-expected adoption of therapy selection volumes that caused the Q1 miss and question whether government and commercial payer coverage expands fast enough to justify current growth assumptions. The consensus target of $28.46 implies nearly 96% upside to the current price — a gap that reflects genuine disagreement rather than market consensus. A director bought $500K of stock on May 11 at $16.15, one of the few insider buy signals in recent months, adding a quiet contrarian note.
Thursday's print is less a test of whether the platform has long-term potential and more a question of whether management can show any acceleration in therapy selection volumes — the metric that broke the stock in the first place.
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