CrowdStrike goes into its June 2 print at $731 — up 9% on Friday alone and 61% over the past month — and has now blown past the targets analysts just raised days ago.
The most striking development since the last note is that the stock has run through its own upgrade cycle. Jefferies lifted its target to $775 on Friday, the highest on the Street, and that number already sits only 6% above where the stock closed. Benchmark and Wedbush both went to $700 last week. BTIG went to $764. The consensus mean is $556 — roughly 24% below the current price — not because analysts are bearish, but because the broader coverage pool simply hasn't moved yet. The active movers are unanimous: every action in the past 10 days has been a raise, zero cuts, all maintaining positive ratings. The Street is chasing the tape into the print, not leading it.
Options have grown more defensive as the stock has climbed. The put/call ratio has risen to 0.96, nearly two standard deviations above its 20-day average of 0.89 — the most cautious options positioning seen in this cycle. That reading was 0.93 when the last note published on May 27; it has continued drifting higher as the stock added another 9%. Investors are paying more for downside protection even as — or because — the headline move has been so sharp. Borrow conditions offer no corroborating short pressure: availability is deeply loose at nearly 6,000% of short interest, cost to borrow has eased to 0.36%, and short interest has edged down 3% on the week to just 2.9% of the float. There is no short squeeze dynamic at work here.
The bull case rests on platform consolidation — CrowdStrike's Falcon ecosystem expanding into new modules across a sticky customer base — and on AI-native security demand that benefits a cloud-first architecture. Bears point to Flex licensing dependency and geographic concentration in the US as structural limits on the growth runway, and at a trailing P/E above 124x and EV/EBITDA of 85x, the valuation leaves no room for delivery shortfalls. CEO George Kurtz sold roughly $1.2 million in stock on May 26, spread across multiple small tranches — low individual significance scores, consistent with a pre-planned program, but a visible signal heading into the week.
The last earnings print produced a 5.9% one-day gain and a 13.4% five-day move — a strong reaction on what was a beat. The June 2 report now arrives after a 61% one-month run, with the stock ahead of every analyst target except the one just raised on the morning of the print, and options showing the highest defensive tilt of the cycle. The question the print must answer is whether the fundamentals — ARR growth, net new logo additions, Falcon Flex adoption curves — are large enough to justify a stock that has already priced in everything the most optimistic analyst just wrote.
See the live data behind this article on ORTEX.
Open CRWD 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.
