CRK enters its June 2 earnings call with the stock down 22% over the past month, short sellers near their most aggressive positioning in six weeks, and every analyst who has moved this week heading in the same direction — lower.
The short interest story is stark. Bears hold roughly 33% of the free float — a level that has climbed from about 30% in mid-April to a peak near 33.3% in the days following May's Q1 earnings miss. Short interest has barely budged since then, drifting only fractionally lower this week. That persistence matters: even with the stock off heavily, shorts are not covering. The borrow market offers little friction to encourage a squeeze. Cost to borrow is a near-negligible 0.58%, and availability is running at about 101% — one share available for every one already borrowed, which is tight but not extreme. The ORTEX short score is 77.4, the highest decile reading in the universe, and has been anchored in that range for the past two weeks. This is not a crowded trade that is about to unwind; it is a settled, well-funded short thesis.
Options traders are becoming more cautious at the margin, though not aggressively bearish. The put/call ratio has jumped to 0.57, running well above its 20-day average of 0.48 — about 1.4 standard deviations elevated, a notable shift from the sub-0.44 range that held through most of April and early May. That move has tracked almost exactly with the earnings print and subsequent guidance cut. The defensive tilt in options confirms what the short book already shows: the market remains skeptical of a near-term recovery.
The analyst community has swung decisively negative since the Q1 results. Mizuho's Nitin Kumar cut his target from $25 to $21 this morning while holding at Neutral. Morgan Stanley trimmed to $18 from $19 earlier this week. UBS lowered its Sell-rated target to $13 — from $17 as recently as May 11 — and that target now sits essentially at the current price of $13.18. The mean price target across the Street is $17.83, implying modest recovery potential on paper, but the direction of travel is uniformly down. No analyst has raised estimates or a target in the past two months. The bear case is concrete: Q1 production guidance was cut 6% to 1,275 mmcfe/d midpoint, Q3 guidance of 1,250 mmcfe/d missed consensus by close to 6%, and the Haynesville operational challenges — delayed drilling, infrastructure constraints — have yet to resolve. The bull case rests on four-rig activity, disciplined $1–1.1B capex, and longer-term WHV resource potential, but that thesis needs a cleaner quarter to gain traction.
Ownership concentration adds another layer. Blue Star Exploration holds 54.6% of shares and Williston Drilling holds another 16.3% — meaning over 70% of the company is locked up between two related entities. That leaves a genuinely thin free float against which the short position is measured. Passive managers — BlackRock, State Street, Dimensional — have been modestly adding, but there is no evidence of an active manager making a conviction call into this print. Inside the company, the most recent trades cluster around February 19, when the CEO, CFO, COO, and multiple VPs all sold at $19.85. The stock is now 34% below those levels.
The earnings history is blunt. The last quarterly print on May 5-6 sent the stock down nearly 16% in a single session and 17% over the following five days. That was the response to the production guidance cut. Next week's June 2 release is the first chance for management to either demonstrate that output is stabilising or confirm that the Haynesville challenges are more structural. Peers have also sold off sharply — RRC fell 5.5% on the week, AR lost 6.7%, and GPOR slid 6.7% — suggesting the weakness is sector-wide, driven by natural gas price pressure, rather than CRK-specific. But CRK's post-earnings drawdown was roughly three times as deep as its peer group's weekly moves, pointing to a stock-specific credibility problem layered on top of the macro.
The June 2 print is therefore less about whether Comstock is a Haynesville operator and more about whether management can show that May production has stabilised and the Q3 guidance floor is genuinely a floor.
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