Rubrik heads into its June 3 earnings report having added 44% in a single month, with short sellers scrambling to keep pace.
The most striking dynamic in the setup is the divergence between surging price and rising short interest. Short interest climbed 23% in the past week to 11.4% of the free float — a meaningful level that has been accelerating even as the stock ran to $78.63. That tension, shorts building into a rally, is the clearest signal of how contested this name has become. Yet the lending market tells a different story about squeeze risk: availability is a comfortable 661%, meaning there is ample room for new borrowers without a supply crunch, and cost to borrow has remained low at 0.43%. Shorts are betting bigger but not paying a premium to do so.
Options positioning reinforces the bullish lean. The put/call ratio has drifted to 0.44, below its 20-day average of 0.47 and near its lowest reading in a year. Call-side demand is the dominant current heading into the print — options traders are not hedging; they are reaching for upside. That aligns with the ORTEX short score of 53.9, which has ticked up over the past two weeks but remains far from extreme territory.
The analyst community has been directionally constructive in recent weeks. Oppenheimer upgraded the stock to Outperform on May 20, adding a target of $85. BTIG lifted its Buy target from $64 to $76 on May 21. At a consensus mean target near $85, the Street broadly sees modest upside from current levels, though the stock's 44% monthly run has compressed that margin. The bull case centres on Rubrik's cyber resilience platform and high subscription renewal rates, with improving EPS momentum ranking in the 97th percentile across the ORTEX universe. Bears point to brutal pricing competition — the well-cited loss of a $700k deal over a $5k discount — and potential margin exposure as hardware and memory costs remain elevated. The PE multiple at roughly 207x and EV/EBITDA near 188x leave little room for guidance disappointment.
Institutional flows add a layer of nuance. Fidelity added nearly 2.9 million shares in Q1, Vanguard initiated a full position worth roughly 8 million shares, and PointState built a new stake of over 1.5 million shares. That breadth of institutional buying has underpinned the rally. On the other side, the CFO sold around $1 million of stock in early April, and a director sold a similar amount in May — both at prices well below current levels, which now look more like routine selling than bearish conviction. Past earnings have been unkind: the stock fell 7% the day after the March 12 print, and lost 11% over the following five days. The June 3 report will test whether the current 44% monthly rally reflects genuine re-rating or positioning that has simply run ahead of the fundamentals.
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