Scotts Miracle-Gro enters the first week of June having shed 4.2% over five sessions to close at $56.42 — the lowest print since early March — while short sellers quietly add to a position that has grown nearly 18% in a single month.
The short interest story is the most pressing angle here. Bearish positioning has climbed sharply: SI % of free float hit 9.9% on June 2, up from roughly 8.4% a month ago and rising 5.4% in a single session on Tuesday alone. That puts shorts at almost 10% of the float — a meaningful level for a consumer lawn-and-garden business. The FINRA-reported figure confirms the trend, with 5.35 million shares short as of the mid-May settlement. The ORTEX short score is 62.4, near the top of its recent range and well above the 59-60 area seen in mid-May, reflecting the incremental bearish pressure building in the name.
Borrow conditions tell a different story, however. Cost to borrow has actually eased — falling more than 21% over the past week to just 0.50% annualised, close to its lowest level of the past month. Availability is generous at 356%, meaning there are more than three times as many shares available to borrow as there are currently borrowed. That's a far cry from the tightest point of the past 52 weeks, when availability compressed to 170% in late May. The lending market is not stressed. Shorts are rebuilding because they want to, not because a squeeze is forcing them out. Options positioning is mildly elevated — the put/call ratio hit 0.70 on Tuesday, roughly 1.6 standard deviations above its 20-day average of 0.68 — a modest lean toward defensive hedging, but well short of the panic readings this stock has seen.
The Street is split, with most recent moves pointing cautiously bearish. JP Morgan downgraded to Neutral from Overweight in late March and trimmed its target to $67. Wells Fargo maintained its Overweight but cut the target by $3 to $72 in April. That leaves the mean analyst target at $72.83 — a 29% premium to Tuesday's close, which appears credible given the stock's recent de-rating. The bull case centres on the 50% benefit from favourable shipment timing that boosted consumer revenue this quarter and management's stated plans to invest in efficiency gains. Bears point to projected US consumer revenue declining 1% in FY25, EBITDA pressure around $575 million, and persistent balance sheet leverage. EV/EBITDA has compressed to 9.3x — declining about 0.22x over the past 30 days as the stock has sold off — which begins to look attractive in a vacuum but sits against a negative book value (PB of -11.4x), reflecting the company's significant debt load. The dividend score ranks in the 98th percentile, though dividend history in the data is stale since mid-2022, and there is no current indication of an active dividend.
Institutional ownership is concentrated. The founding Hagedorn family, via Hagedorn Partnership LP, controls 22.6% of shares and trimmed 50,000 shares in February at $66.40 — a price well above where the stock trades today. The CFO bought 693 shares at $71.44 in late February, a small but on-market signal of inside confidence near the $70 area. The most recent insider transaction was a routine COO sale of 5,897 shares at $65.38 in late April, shortly before the Q2 earnings release.
On that release — Q2 results landed on April 29 — the stock fell 4.1% on the day and shed a further 3.9% by the end of that week. The next print is scheduled for July 29, giving the market roughly eight weeks to digest whether the shipment-timing tailwind cited this quarter will be validated or reversed in Q3 data. Among correlated peers, ECL gained 2.3% on Tuesday and is up 0.8% on the week, while SHW fell 5.9% over the same period — a mixed chemical-adjacent peer group that offers little directional read-across to SMG's consumer positioning.
The setup heading into summer is one of building short interest against a stock that has already given back its 2026 gains, with the July 29 print increasingly the focal point for whether the bear case around FY25 revenue normalisation holds.
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