GRPN has become the market's most striking contradiction: a stock up 41% in a month, yet carrying short interest at 58% of its free float with availability so tight that borrowing new positions is nearly impossible.
The price move has been sharp. From under $10 in mid-March, the stock closed at $20.69 last Tuesday — a 9.3% single-session gain capping an 18.8% week. That kind of momentum would normally shake out at least some bearish conviction. Here, it has not. Short interest at 58.2% of the float has barely budged, down just 0.2% on the week and up 2.1% over the month. The crowded short remains almost entirely intact even as the stock doubles underneath it.
The lending market signals extreme tightness. Availability has collapsed to just 2.1% — meaning there are roughly two shares available to borrow for every hundred already lent out. For much of the past fortnight, availability sat below 1%, the narrowest reading of the past year. New short positions are effectively impossible to initiate at scale. Cost to borrow, at 1.58% annualised, has risen 13% over the week, though it remains low in absolute terms — the lending market is tight on supply, not yet punishing on price. Options traders, meanwhile, show no sign of panic in either direction: the put/call ratio has drifted to 0.375, a shade below its 20-day mean and close to its 52-week low, suggesting options positioning is leaning gently bullish rather than hedged.
The analyst community is firmly split and — notably — both sides are below the current price. Goldman Sachs' Eric Sheridan, maintaining a Sell, raised his target to $13 on May 12, marking the most recent bellwether action. That target is now 37% below where the stock trades. Bullish analysts at Northland Capital Markets and Roth Capital had targets in the $39-$47 range, but those calls were made in mid-2025 and should be treated as dated given the stock's subsequent volatility. The mean target of $26.33 implies modest downside from current levels — the Street, on balance, did not anticipate the recent run. Valuation has repriced sharply: the P/E has expanded by 1.75 turns over the past month to 12.5x, while EV/EBITDA barely moved, reflecting how equity-driven the re-rating has been. The ORTEX short score remains elevated at 77.1, placing it in the bottom 3rd percentile of the universe on short score rank — a reading that captures the depth of bearish structural positioning.
Institutional ownership offers a further layer of texture. Pale Fire Capital SE holds 26.8% of shares — an anchor position that hasn't changed since May 1. Windward Management added 271,829 shares in Q1, and Continental General Insurance built its stake by 690,758 shares. Renaissance Technologies added 509,600 shares in Q1, a meaningful move for a quant house. CEO Dusan Senkypl received a 345,003-share award on May 1, bringing his reported holding to 2.99% of the company. On the sell side, COO Jiri Ponrt sold 57,315 shares at $14.89 on May 1 — a price now 39% below the current close — in what appears to have been a tax-driven award-and-sell. Net insider activity over 90 days runs to roughly 98,000 shares bought on a net basis.
The most recent earnings print provides context for the stock's behaviour. In May, GRPN moved 12.2% higher the day after reporting, then added a further 8.3% over the following five days — the current rally echoes that pattern. Bears cite guidance pointing to billing declines of 2.5–5% and revenue drops of 5–7.5%, alongside EBITDA that may compress further. Bulls counter with evidence of operating leverage, improving cash conversion, and a stock that has found institutional sponsorship at distressed levels. The next earnings event is scheduled for August 6.
With availability at near-zero and 58% of the float short, the setup into that August print is one where the direction and magnitude of any borrow market move — rather than the earnings number itself — may be the story worth watching.
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