FactSet Research Systems heads into its June 18 earnings date with short sellers adding exposure, options traders piling into puts near 52-week highs, and the borrow market quietly tightening — a convergence of signals that frames the next few weeks as the most closely watched in months.
The most striking development this week is in short positioning. Short interest has jumped 44% over the past month, now running at 14.3% of free float — a level that places FDS firmly in high-conviction bear territory. The move accelerated in late April: shorts held below 10% of float through mid-April, then surged past 13% in a matter of days as the stock attempted a recovery from its year-to-date lows. That rebuild has continued steadily through May, with shares short edging to a new monthly high of roughly 5.34 million. The ORTEX short score reflects the growing bearish consensus at 66.6, its highest point in the ten-day history shown and ranking in just the 6th percentile of all stocks — meaning 94% of names carry lower short pressure than FDS right now.
The borrow market tells a supporting story. Cost to borrow has risen 38% over the past week to 0.57% — still cheap in absolute terms, but the pace of the move suggests incremental demand for shares to short. Availability has tightened meaningfully: the ratio of available shares to borrowed shares has compressed from around 330% in mid-April to 222% today, touching its tightest level of the past year. That compression, while still technically in comfortable territory, marks a clear directional trend. Every week that shorts add without a corresponding surge in available supply pushes the lending market closer to a genuinely crowded setup. A look at the options market reinforces this picture of building defensiveness. The put/call ratio is running at 1.48, well above its 20-day average of 1.20 and close to the 52-week high of 1.52. That's roughly 1.4 standard deviations above the mean — not an extreme reading in isolation, but the sustained elevation over the past week (PCR has been above 1.45 every session since May 19) points to a structural shift in how options traders are positioning, not a one-day spike.
The Street is largely aligned with the bears, though the picture is more nuanced on valuation. The most recent action came today: RBC Capital's Ashish Sabadra trimmed his target modestly from $243 to $240, maintaining a Sector Perform rating. That follows a more consequential Goldman Sachs move in early April, when the bank cut its target from $253 to $217 while keeping its Sell rating — a notable signal from a bellwether firm that had already been negative on the name. Bears at Wells Fargo and Barclays have also maintained Underweight and Underperform stances, with targets in the $200-$210 range. The mean analyst target is $252, implying roughly 9% upside from the current $230.92 — but the distribution is highly skewed, anchored upward by UBS's $380 Buy target. Strip that out and the bear/neutral camp implies meaningful downside. On fundamentals, the trailing P/E is 12.6x and EV/EBITDA 10.1x, which look undemanding for a data franchise; the bulls argue exactly that, pointing to solid client retention, acquisitions like CUSIP Global Services, and a forward EPS growth tailwind flagged by a 68% year-on-year increase in forward estimates. The bears counter with buy-side concentration risk, technology spend pressure on margins, and AI disruption risk to traditional data bundling — themes that have weighed on financial data peers broadly.
Institutional ownership adds another layer of texture. Baron Capital Group is the dominant active holder at 10.3% of shares, having added 867,742 shares in Q1 2026 — a meaningful conviction buy from a fundamental growth manager. Marshall Wace added 209,000 shares over the same period, suggesting even some hedge fund money is long. But Wells Fargo trimmed nearly 500,000 shares in Q1, and the overall holder count of 364 institutions is not large for a name of this profile. Insider data is stale (the most recent trade on record is from early February), so no fresh signal there.
The last earnings print on March 31 produced a sharp positive reaction — the stock jumped nearly 10% on the day and extended gains to 11.3% over the following five days. That outcome came after a prior print in December that barely moved the stock before a five-day slide of 5.6%. The variance in reactions is wide, which matters because options traders are clearly aware of it: elevated put demand ahead of June 18 may reflect hedging against an outcome more like December than March, even as the stock has recovered 4% this week. With MORN flat on the week and SPGI and NDAQ both slightly lower, FDS's relative outperformance this week is something worth monitoring — the question heading into June 18 is whether that resilience holds or whether the rebuilt short base and elevated put activity prove prescient.
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