Hims & Hers Health has spent the week consolidating a difficult month, with the stock down 10% on the week and 22% over the past month, and a striking split opening between options traders turning optimistic and short sellers who have stopped covering.
The covering wave that defined the post-earnings week has stalled. Short interest nudged back up 1.9% on May 19 alone, reaching 29.3% of the free float — still well below the late-April peak above 39%, but no longer falling. The prior note flagged shorts retreating despite holding a large position; that retreat has now paused. More telling is the lending market: availability has dropped to zero percent, meaning every share in the borrow pool is already lent out. That is the tightest it has been since late April, and it has held at zero for over a week now. Cost to borrow remains modest at 1.19% APR — up 7% on the week and 24% over the past month — but it is still far from the distressed territory that would make fresh shorting painful. The combination of near-zero availability and flat-to-rising short interest suggests a crowded trade that is no longer unwinding, but also not yet being squeezed.
Options positioning tells a sharply different story. Traders are the least defensive they have been in months. The put/call ratio has dropped to 0.60, more than two standard deviations below its 20-day average of 0.67 — the most call-skewed reading of the past year, just above the 52-week low of 0.58. That is not hedging behaviour. It reads as active demand for upside exposure, even as the stock trades 22% lower than a month ago and short interest remains elevated at nearly 30% of float. The divergence between the options market and the short book is the clearest tension in the setup right now.
The Street is similarly split, but has mostly moved in one direction since earnings. BofA trimmed its target twice in a week — from $32 to $30 on May 13, then to $28 on May 19 — while holding its Neutral rating, signalling persistent caution on the margin story. JPMorgan cut from $35 to $33 but kept its Overweight, maintaining a bull stance despite the miss. Needham went the other way entirely, raising its target from $30 to $35 with a Buy. The mean target across analysts is $26.46, roughly 18% above the current close of $22.44 — a meaningful gap, though much of the Street is parked at Neutral rather than leaning hard either way. Factor scores reflect the ambivalence: the 12-month forward EPS growth rank is in the 91st percentile, pointing to explosive earnings expectations ahead, but the short score rank sits in just the 6th percentile and EPS surprise ranks third — the company has consistently underdelivered on near-term results even as long-term forecasts stay elevated.
Insider selling adds a note of caution. The CFO, Oluyemi Okupe, has sold shares on multiple occasions since mid-March, with the most recent transaction on May 18 — the day before this note — at $23.64. Earlier April sales came in above $25 and $30. The selling is spread across multiple dates rather than concentrated in a single large block, and the individual transaction values are modest. Still, the net insider position over the 90-day window represents over $36 million in sales, with no offsetting buying from any other executive in the visible record.
The next scheduled earnings event is June 11. Given that the last two prints produced declines of 11.5% and 3.9% on the day — with a five-day loss of 21% following the most recent result — the options market's current tilt toward calls rather than puts is the number worth watching as that date approaches.
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