BTGO has dropped 31.8% in a single week. Options traders are responding fast.
The put-call ratio hit 0.48 on May 20 — 2.6 standard deviations above the 20-day mean of 0.34. That's the sharpest demand for downside protection in over a month, and it arrives after earnings on May 13 delivered doubled revenue yet still sent the stock lower.
The options move has company. Cantor Fitzgerald's Brett Knoblauch cut his target from $17 to $15 on May 14 — the day after earnings — while holding his Overweight rating. That follows a string of reductions from Mizuho, Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, and Rosenblatt, all of which trimmed targets in late March. The mean analyst target now sits at $14.58, implying roughly 80% upside from the current $8.12 close. The gap between analyst conviction and price action is unusually wide.
Short interest rose 11.4% in one week to 2.58 million shares. Availability has tightened to 14.9% — meaning roughly one share remains available for every six already borrowed. That's a very tight lending market. A week ago availability stood near 28%. The direction is clear.
The 52-week low for availability was 0.13%, hit in mid-April. At that point the lending pool was essentially exhausted. Availability has since recovered from those extremes but is now heading back down. Cost to borrow sits at 4.73% — modest, and actually down 13% over the past month — so the tighter availability hasn't yet fed through into borrow costs.
Several institutional names built new positions in Q1. Pantera Capital Partners added 3.3 million shares. Goldman Sachs added 2.1 million. Jump Trading and Andreessen Horowitz each initiated stakes. Those filings are as of March 31 — before the post-earnings slide erased most of the year's gains.
On the insider side, the CEO sold 22,426 shares at $9.82 in late March. Earlier in January, the CFO, COO, and Chief Compliance Officer all sold at $16.74. Net insider activity over 90 days totalled roughly $7.8 million in sales.
Next earnings are scheduled for August 12. The ORTEX short score sits at 59 — elevated, and edging higher over the past two weeks. With availability tightening, options hedging climbing, and the stock already down sharply post-earnings, the question is whether the borrow market catches up to the positioning pressure.
Data summary
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