NetApp heads into its May 28 quarterly report with a curious split: the stock is up 15% over the past month, yet short sellers have been adding to their positions throughout the rally.
Short interest tells a clearly bearish-against-the-trend story. SI % of free float climbed to 11.1% — up from roughly 10% in early April — and has risen nine sessions out of the last ten. That is a meaningful build, not noise. The stock traded up to $120.59 on Tuesday while shorts were simultaneously growing their positions, which points to conviction rather than forced covering. The official FINRA fortnightly figure puts days to cover at 10.4, meaning it would take roughly two full trading weeks to unwind the position at average volumes. Borrow conditions, however, give no sign of stress: cost to borrow is a negligible 0.51%, barely changed over the past month, and availability is a wide 574% — nearly six shares available to borrow for every one currently shorted. There is plenty of room for the short book to grow without any mechanical squeeze pressure building.
Options positioning reinforces the bullish tilt in the near term. The put/call ratio dropped to 0.29 on Tuesday — well below its 20-day average of 0.34 and close to the lowest reading of the past year. Call volume is dominating the options market heading into the print, which is consistent with the price action but sits in notable contrast to the rising short interest. The ORTEX short score is running at 62, near its recent high, signalling that the quantitative composite of short-side factors is elevated even as the surface-level sentiment looks greedy.
The Street's view is cautious and has been drifting that way. The most meaningful recent move came on the day of publication: Bank of America's Wamsi Mohan raised his target from $118 to $125 but stayed at Neutral — telling in itself, as the stock is already through that prior target. JPMorgan made the harder call in April, cutting from Overweight to Neutral and trimming to $110. Morgan Stanley moved to Underweight in January with a $89 target. That trio of neutral-to-bearish views from major firms stands against the price recovery, and the mean price target across the analyst community at $117.60 sits fractionally below where the stock closed on Tuesday. The EV/EBITDA multiple is running at 10x, and the P/E at 13.6x — neither extreme, but up roughly 5% on the month as the price has outrun consensus upgrades.
Insider activity at the May 15 grant cycle produced the typical award-and-sell pattern. CEO George Kurian received 18,489 shares in an award and simultaneously sold 9,326, pocketing roughly $1.1 million. The CFO and Chief Administration Officer ran similar paired trades. These are plan-based sales that coincide with equity awards, not discretionary disposals — net 90-day insider flows are actually positive at $18 million, skewed by the award side of those paired transactions. The pattern carries little directional signal.
Peer performance over the week sharpens the context. HPE gained nearly 8% — outpacing NTAP's 3.8% weekly move. DELL fell 1.5% and SMCI dropped 6.8%. NTAP is holding the middle ground in what has been a choppy week for hardware and storage names.
From prior earnings, the pattern is modest. The February 2026 print produced a 2.8% drop on the day, recovered to flat by the five-day mark. The November 2025 print went the other way — essentially flat on day one but then gained 6.3% over the following week. The range of reactions is narrow, which means the May 28 release will likely be about guidance language on cloud and hybrid storage demand, not whether the headline number beats or misses. That framing matters most for how the existing 11% short position behaves in the days after the report.
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