CGO heads into the final week of April in a cautious drift, down roughly 9% over the past month to CAD 62.51, three weeks after an earnings print that caused the stock to fall nearly 7% in a single session.
The earnings reaction on April 9 is the sharpest piece of recent context. Q2 EPS of $2.12 beat the $1.90 estimate, yet revenue of $713M fell short of the $720.9M forecast — and the market sold first, asked questions later, with CGO dropping 6.9% on the day and a further 4.3% over the following week. TD used the dip as an opportunity, upgrading the stock to Buy on April 13, the day after the dust settled. That upgrade, combined with a consensus mean price target of CAD 76.50 against the current price near 62.51, implies the Street sees material upside — though with only one buy and one hold in the mix, the analyst community is thin.
Short positioning has been rebuilding since that event, and that is the clearest tension this week. The SI % of free float climbed from around 1.5% at mid-month to 1.6% now — a 5.7% week-on-week increase. The move is modest in absolute terms, but the direction is notable: shorts had reduced aggressively in the first half of April, with the position dropping from roughly 1.74% of the float in late March to a trough near 1.51% by April 7, before reversing sharply as the earnings disappointment on revenue became the dominant narrative. In absolute share terms, the position has gone from around 116,000 shorted shares to 123,000 this week — a rebuild of about 6,000 shares in under two weeks.
Borrow conditions paint a complementary picture, though the numbers here are volatile. Cost to borrow more than doubled over the past month, reaching 1.40% as of April 28 — up nearly 96% from a month ago. That said, day-to-day swings have been extreme: the rate ran as high as 3.6% in mid-April and as low as 0.58% on April 10, suggesting thin liquidity in the borrow pool rather than a structural squeeze. Availability remains loose overall, with borrow demand representing only a fraction of what's available — the 52-week utilization peak was just 9.46%, and the current reading of 2.4% indicates no meaningful constraint on new short positions. This is not a borrow-constrained story.
The factor score data adds nuance. The ORTEX short score has edged up to 36.3 this week, its highest reading over the past two weeks, though still well below levels that would signal crowded short interest. The dividend score ranks in the 85th percentile — Cogeco has historically been a reliable income name — while the analyst recommendation differential score is an eye-catching 92nd percentile, suggesting the stock is more positively rated relative to its own history than most of its peers. The EV/EBITDA multiple of around 5.1x reflects a value framing that has been consistent. The PE near 5.8x is at the lower end of what the Canadian telecom sector typically commands. None of these multiples have moved materially over the past week.
For context on the peer group, sister company CCA — the most highly correlated name with a 92% correlation — fell 0.7% on the week, roughly in line with CGO's own 0.8% decline. BCE dropped 1.7% over the same period while T managed a small gain of 0.2%. The relative softness in CGO and BCE suggests the integrated Canadian telecom trade has been under incremental pressure, while pure-play wireless TELUS held its ground.
The next scheduled earnings release is July 8. Between now and then, the key data to watch is whether short interest continues its post-earnings rebuild, and whether the cost-to-borrow volatility stabilises — or begins to trend more decisively in one direction.
See the live data behind this article on ORTEX.
Open CGO on ORTEX →ORTEX Market Intelligence content is generated by AI from a snapshot of ORTEX's proprietary data. Content is informational only and does not constitute investment advice.
