AppLovin heads into its June 3 earnings call with a split personality: the stock is up 8% on the week and 15% on the month, while the CEO and every named C-suite executive quietly sold shares at the same moment.
The insider picture is the most striking data point this week. On May 20, five executives — including founder and CEO Adam Foroughi, CFO Matt Stumpf, CTO Vasily Shikin, CLO Victoria Valenzuela, and Principal Accounting Officer Dmitriy Dorosh — all sold stock on the same day at $482. Combined, the cluster represents a coordinated plan execution rather than a one-off trim. Ninety-day net insider activity is positive in share count terms (net +201,000 shares), but much of that reflects earlier grants rather than purchases. No insider has bought in the open market in the data window. The sales came as the stock sat about 6% below where it trades today — the sellers left money on the table relative to this week's close.
The lending market offers no drama to match the insider story. Availability is extremely loose, running above 2,100% — meaning shares available to borrow outnumber shares already borrowed by more than 21 to one. Cost to borrow has ticked up about 23% over the week but remains negligible at 0.52%. Short interest is 3.6% of the free float, down sharply from a peak near 4.3% in mid-April, with the past month showing a 15% reduction in shares short. The borrow market tells a story of shorts slowly retreating, not a crowd pressing a new thesis.
Options positioning is close to neutral. The put/call ratio at 0.81 is barely above its 20-day average of 0.80, with a z-score under 0.5. The 52-week range runs from 0.55 to 0.92, which puts the current reading in the middle of the pack. Options traders are neither hedging hard nor loading up on calls ahead of earnings — an unusually measured setup for a stock that has moved 4% the day after its most recent result.
The Street remains broadly constructive, though JPMorgan is the notable holdout. After the May 7 earnings print, most analysts raised targets: UBS moved to $750, Macquarie to $730, Piper Sandler to $665, and Needham held at $700. JPMorgan maintained Neutral with a $515 target — almost exactly where the stock trades today — making it the clearest articulation of the bear thesis that current pricing already reflects near-term execution. The consensus mean sits around $644, implying roughly 25% upside from current levels, but that gap compresses if JPMorgan's view proves correct. On valuation, the trailing P/E is near 27x and EV/EBITDA at 22.5x — both expanding over the past month in line with the price recovery. EPS momentum ranks in the 88th percentile on a 30-day basis, and the analyst recommendation differential factor ranks in the 98th percentile, reflecting how tilted the analyst community remains toward buy ratings relative to the stock's history.
The bull and bear debate circles a familiar tension. Bulls point to 51% revenue growth guidance, expanding EBITDA margins, and early evidence of e-commerce traction through the Axon Pixel — the company reported a 4.4% lift among brands using the tool. Bears flag the opacity of the AXON 2 optimizer, the still-nascent e-commerce segment, and what happens to multiples if gaming revenue growth decelerates. The stock's most correlated peers had a quieter week: PLTR added 1%, ZETA gained 2.4%, while ADSK and MSFT both dipped roughly 2%, making APP's 8% weekly move a clear outperformer in the cohort.
With earnings confirmed for June 3, the read on e-commerce revenue trajectory and any update to AXON 2 monetisation detail will be the pivot point — the question is whether the Street's broad optimism finds confirmation in the numbers, or whether JPMorgan's lone neutral at current levels turns out to be the better-calibrated call.
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