Insulet Corporation has dropped another 7.4% this week to $142.43 — extending a brutal month that has now cost shareholders nearly 19% — yet the short-side narrative remains stubbornly muted.
The most interesting tension in this stock right now is the disconnect between the severity of the price move and the absence of meaningful short conviction. Short interest has edged up 4.1% over the week to 4.3% of free float, and is about 10% higher than a month ago — but the absolute level is modest. Availability is effectively unconstrained, with the lending pool so deep it caps out at the data ceiling. Cost to borrow jumped sharply this week to 1.05%, up from 0.37% a week ago — a near-tripling — but the starting level was so low that even this spike leaves borrowing cheap in absolute terms. Options tell a similar story: the put/call ratio at 0.73 is fractionally below its 20-day average of 0.74, and the z-score is essentially flat. There is no detectable hedging pressure building in the options market despite the price decline. The week's selling is coming from long holders reducing exposure, not from short sellers loading up.
The Street is doing something unusual: holding its ratings while aggressively cutting targets. Since the May earnings print, almost every firm covering the name has trimmed its price objective — BofA from $288 to $208, BTIG from $260 to $235 this week, Citigroup from $175 to $165 — yet all maintained positive or neutral ratings. RBC reiterated Outperform at $280 without a cut. The lone bear remains Barclays at Underweight with a $198 target. The consensus mean of $244 is now 71% above the current price — a gap that has widened further as the stock has continued to fall since the previous note published on May 27. That gap reflects genuine disagreement about the recovery timeline rather than a straightforward bullish call; the bull case rests on Omnipod 5 adoption and international expansion, while the bear case centres on manufacturing quality issues at the Acton facility, product recalls, and margin pressure. EPS momentum factor scores rank in the 73rd–76th percentile, and the forward EPS estimate is trending higher year-on-year — suggesting the Street's long-run model hasn't broken, even if near-term execution has disappointed.
Valuation multiples have compressed alongside the price. The P/E has fallen 4.8 points over the past month to 19.9x, and price-to-book has shed nearly one full turn to 4.2x. EV/EBITDA has drifted down to 11.5x. None of these are distressed readings, but they mark a meaningful de-rating for a name that carried premium growth multiples not long ago. Institutional ownership looks stable at the top — BlackRock holds 9.2%, with FMR and State Street making only minor adjustments in April. AQR added over one million shares in Q1, a notable quant inflow. The insider picture is less encouraging: CEO Ashley McEvoy sold 1,411 shares on May 13 at $148.84, a small transaction with a significance score of just 1, but directionally consistent with the broader insider pattern of selling rather than buying into the weakness.
The next earnings event is scheduled for August 6. The two most recent prints produced modest one-day moves of roughly +1.5% and +1.9%, but both were followed by five-day declines of 5.6% and 1.7% respectively — a pattern where any initial relief faded quickly. What to watch between now and then: whether cost to borrow continues to rise as more longs exit and shares become more available to new shorts, and whether the analyst consensus mean begins to converge toward current prices or whether the stock recovers enough to close the gap from below.
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