OLLI heads into its June 3 earnings print with short sellers rebuilding positions at the fastest weekly pace in months — while options traders remain unusually bullish, creating one of the more pointed positioning divergences on the stock this year.
Short interest has climbed back to 8.2% of free float, up from 6.8% three weeks ago. That's a 15% jump in raw shares over the past week alone, and the move brings bears back close to the mid-April peak of around 8.1%. The rebuild is notable in context: shorts faded sharply through late April before reassembling through May in a near-continuous accumulation. With earnings a week away, the fresh positioning reads as a deliberate pre-print bet rather than residual drift.
The borrow market, though, offers no signal of stress. Cost to borrow is a negligible 0.46%, barely moved over the week. Availability is wide open at 555% — meaning roughly five and a half shares remain available for every one already shorted. That is comfortably above even the 52-week floor of 315%, so there is no squeeze pressure and no bottleneck for further positioning either way. Options, meanwhile, tell a completely different story. The put/call ratio has collapsed to 0.31, nearly a full standard deviation below its 20-day average and approaching the 52-week low of 0.30. Calls are dominating the tape. Whatever the shorts are doing with borrowed shares, options traders are leaning hard the other way into the print.
The Street agrees the stock has upside, but keeps nudging targets lower. Every firm that has moved in the past six weeks — RBC, Wells Fargo, Citi, JP Morgan — maintained a positive rating while trimming their number. RBC cut its target to $152 just this morning, the second cut from that desk in a month. Wells Fargo shaved from $130 to $115 on May 13; Citi from $141 to $111 on May 12. The mean target now sits at $133.53, roughly 66% above the current $80.62 price. That gap is wide. The Street clearly expects a recovery, but the rolling target cuts also suggest analysts are still calibrating downward after the stock's 11% slide over the past month. Valuation multiples confirm the reset: the forward P/E has fallen nearly 2.5 points over 30 days to 17.1x, and EV/EBITDA has eased to 12.2x. Neither multiple looks stretched at these levels.
Bulls point to Ollie's differentiated closeout model, a long-term comp algorithm targeting 2% annual growth, and gross margin expansion toward 40.5%, with mid-teens EPS growth as the payoff. Bears counter that inventory levels are rising, new store productivity is slowing, and the closeout merchandise supply is inherently volatile — particularly if macroeconomic pressure on consumer spending eases and fewer distressed goods hit the market. Capital Research and Management added over 1.3 million shares in Q1, and Goldman Sachs Asset Management built a fresh position of 1.6 million shares, suggesting some institutional conviction remains at these lower prices.
The last two confirmed earnings prints show sharply different day-one reactions: a 5.7% gain on the March 12 release, followed by a 1.7% drop on March 19. Both faded further over the following five days. The June 3 setup — shorts at a near-term high, options skewed bullish, and targets well above spot — leaves the stock primed for a directional move in either direction; what to watch is whether the margin and comp trajectory from Q1 results support or undercut the Street's still-elevated recovery thesis.
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