CrowdStrike heads into its June 2 earnings print with the stock at $671.55 — up 9% on the week and nearly 50% over the past month — and the Street still scrambling to catch up.
The analyst upgrade wave that began last week has accelerated. Since the prior note on May 20, Benchmark and Wedbush both raised targets to $700 on May 27, with BTIG going further to $764 the day before. That follows raises from Wells Fargo, Morgan Stanley, Cantor Fitzgerald, Stifel, Truist, Barclays, and TD Cowen over the previous two days — all maintains, all higher targets, zero cuts. The uniformity is striking. Yet the consensus mean target has only climbed to $550 from $527 a week ago, still sitting roughly 18% below where the stock trades today. The averages are lagging because the broader pool of coverage hasn't caught up to the recent movers. Wedbush's Daniel Ives, a bellwether voice in enterprise software, is now at $700; the gap between him and the mean says more about how far the stock has run than about analyst conviction levels.
Options positioning has turned more cautious than the upgrade headlines suggest. The put/call ratio is running at 0.93, nearly 1.8 standard deviations above its 20-day average of 0.88 — the highest it has been in the recent window. That's a meaningful shift. For most of April and into early May, the PCR was anchored below 0.86; it has climbed steadily in the past two weeks as the stock has ripped higher. Traders are adding downside protection into what is now a very extended position ahead of the June 2 release. The lending market, by contrast, tells a completely relaxed story: availability is extraordinarily loose at roughly 4,676% of short interest, with borrow costs falling to 0.37% from 0.55% a week ago. Short interest itself is just 3.1% of the free float and has barely moved. There is no short squeeze dynamic here, no borrow squeeze pressure, and no sign that the bears are building.
The bull case rests on platform consolidation and AI-driven demand. CrowdStrike's Falcon Flex model is pulling customers toward broader suite adoption, and enterprise security budgets have remained resilient. Bears point to valuation — the P/E has expanded to 125x and the price-to-book to 27x, both up sharply over the past 30 days as the stock has rerated. The EV/EBITDA of 85x leaves little room for execution stumble. Factor scores are moderate rather than extreme: EPS momentum over 30 and 90 days scores in the upper-50s, but the EPS surprise rank sits at just 23 — not a stock that consistently smashes estimates. The ORTEX short score has been remarkably stable throughout the rally, hovering in the 32–33 range all month, suggesting the positioning data isn't generating an incremental signal either way.
CEO George Kurtz sold roughly 1,700 shares across multiple tranches on May 21 for a combined total just shy of $1.1 million. The individual lots were small and the trade significance scores were low — this looks like routine programmatic selling rather than a directional signal. At 0.008% of company per transaction, it doesn't move the needle.
Among peers, PANW gained 3.7% on the week while TENB added 11.7% and DDOG rose 7.1%. NOW was the notable underperformer, down 3.4%. CRWD's 9% weekly gain outpaced most of the group, reinforcing that the move is at least partially stock-specific rather than a pure sector bid. The last comparable earnings print, in March 2026, saw the stock gain 5.9% the following day and 13.4% over the subsequent week — the kind of reaction that likely explains some of the hedging activity visible in the current PCR.
With the consensus mean target now sitting nearly $120 below the current price, the June 2 print will be less about beating numbers and more about whether management's forward commentary can justify a stock that has already re-rated aggressively.
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