StepStone Group is reporting fiscal Q4 results tonight against a backdrop where the stock has already given up 6.5% on the week, making the print arguably more consequential than usual.
Options traders are notably more bullish than their recent habit suggests. The put/call ratio has dropped to 0.36 — roughly 1.5 standard deviations below its 20-day average of 0.45. That's a meaningful lean toward calls, not defensive puts, even as the stock has been sliding. Rather than hedging the dip, options participants appear to be positioning for a bounce off tonight's numbers.
Short positioning tells a similar story — and it's not particularly crowded. Short interest runs at nearly 6% of the free float, up roughly 10% over the past month, but the week's reading has actually edged down. The borrow market is extremely loose: availability is running above 2,500% of outstanding short interest, which means there is approximately 25 times as much stock available to borrow as has already been borrowed. Cost to borrow has ticked up 21% on the week to 0.46% annualised, but that's still barely above zero in absolute terms. Nothing in the lending market is flashing squeeze risk. The short score of 44 sits in the lower half of the universe — shorts are present but not aggressively pressing.
The Street is broadly constructive but has been walking targets lower in recent months. Since February, Oppenheimer cut its price target from $105 to $90, BMO Capital trimmed from $70 to $58, and Barclays briefly lowered before upgrading the rating to Overweight and raising its target to $61. Evercore nudged its Outperform target up to $59 in late April. The mean target now sits at $71.38, implying roughly 36% upside from current levels — a gap that looks striking against the stock's 16%-plus year-to-date decline but also reflects how aggressively targets have been cut. With the stock near $52.52 and several targets still clustered in the $58–$61 range, the effective floor implied by the most recent round of analyst revisions isn't far off current price. The PE has compressed to 18.5x over the past month, down almost 2 turns on a 30-day basis, while EV/EBITDA has eased to 7.8x — valuations that are no longer demanding for an alternatives manager growing AUM.
The bull case heading into tonight centres on Private Wealth momentum. StepStone's evergreen funds hit a record $15 billion in AUM last quarter, up $2.8 billion sequentially, and fundraising across commingled and managed accounts topped $4 billion in gross additions. EPS momentum is among the strongest in the universe — the 90-day percentile rank is at 94 — suggesting analyst revisions have been running strongly positive even as the stock has sold off. Bears point to EBITDA margin pressure and pricing headwinds, though notably the bear case in the data appears better suited to a different business, with references to frac services that don't match StepStone's profile at all. The more credible risk is operational leverage: if deployment slows or fee rates soften, the EBITDA build that underpins consensus targets becomes harder to sustain.
The peer group has had a rough week too. CG fell roughly 2.5% over the past five sessions, TPG dropped about 2%, and BX largely held flat — down just 0.4%. KKR was essentially unchanged on the week. STEP's 6.5% decline therefore stands out relative to the alt-asset management cohort, pointing to something stock-specific rather than pure sector rotation.
The prior two earnings prints give a mixed read. The February 2026 result produced a 5.7% jump on day one, only to give most of it back by day five. The quarter before that — reported at the same February date based on timing — saw the stock fall 2.4% immediately and slide 11.6% over the following week. Whether tonight's record Private Wealth figures are enough to arrest the slide — or whether guidance disappointments on fee margins repeat the pattern — is the question the market is now pricing.
See the live data behind this article on ORTEX.
Open STEP 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.
