CMCSA heads into its Q1 2026 earnings release — due today — with options traders turning notably bullish while short sellers quietly add back to their positions, creating a divergence worth watching.
Options positioning has swung to one of the most call-heavy readings of the past year. The put/call ratio dropped to 0.495 on Tuesday, nearly 1.8 standard deviations below its 20-day average of 0.61. That's the lowest the ratio has been in the past six weeks. The shift is sharp: through most of March and early April the ratio hovered between 0.65 and 0.71, meaning the move toward calls is a genuine rotation, not noise.
Short interest tells a more complicated story. Bears have been quietly rebuilding. Estimated short interest climbed 7.3% over the past week to 77.1 million shares, or roughly 2.1% of the free float — low in absolute terms, but moving. The week-on-week jump is the largest single-week increase in at least 30 sessions, reversing a mid-April dip when SI briefly compressed toward 65 million shares after the tariff-relief rally. Borrow conditions remain loose: cost to borrow has actually declined, falling nearly 19% on the week to just 0.37% annualised, the cheapest it has been all month. Availability in the lending pool is ample. The combination — more shares short, but cheaper to borrow — points to short sellers building tactical hedges rather than committing to a structural bear case. The ORTEX short score, at 31.8, is mid-range and has moved less than a point all week.
The Street is broadly cautious but not pessimistic, with the consensus sitting at "hold" and 17 analysts neutral against 5 buys. The consensus price target of $33.07 implies about 20% upside to the current $27.64 close. Two analysts moved targets higher on Thursday following the earnings beat: Citigroup lifted to $35.50, maintaining Buy, while Evercore ISI raised to $36.00, keeping Outperform. Both actions are recent enough to be relevant. The stock trades at roughly 5.8x EV/EBITDA on trailing numbers — the bull case centres on that depressed multiple, with proponents arguing a tax-efficient breakup of the media assets could unlock 30-plus percent upside. Bears counter that Studios and Media EBITDA has been deteriorating, and the cost drag from major events — Super Bowl, Olympics — makes near-term free cash flow harder to read. EPS momentum is muted: the 30-day forward estimate percentile ranks in the bottom quarter of the universe, flagging downward revisions. On the positive side, the forward yield of roughly 4.9% provides an income floor that helps explain why large passive holders — Vanguard, BlackRock, Capital Research — have been adding shares, not reducing.
The CFO sold $2.3 million worth of stock at $31.75 on March 5, now well above the current price. That transaction predated the recent slide and was modest relative to position size, but it does mean the most recent open-market signal from the C-suite was a sale into higher prices rather than a buy into weakness — something worth noting given the stock has fallen nearly 5% this week and 8% year-to-date.
The last earnings reaction is directly relevant here. Q4 results on January 29 produced a 4.7% gain on the day and an 8.6% five-day follow-through — the stock's best short-term earnings response in recent history. Q1 results on April 23 reversed all of that, with the stock dropping 6.2% on the day. Today's print therefore arrives with investors already digesting a fresh disappointment; the gap between the call-heavy options positioning and that recent negative reaction is the core tension for the session. Peers T and VZ both held up better on the week, gaining 0.7% and 2.1% respectively, underscoring CMCSA's relative underperformance among telecom comps.
The next few hours narrow the debate to one question: whether the call-heavy options positioning ahead of today's print reflects genuine confidence in re-acceleration, or is simply a post-drop bounce play into a catalyst — and the earnings reaction will provide the answer.
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