Snowflake has printed earnings, surged 35% in a single session, and is now pulling back — and the question this week is whether the short sellers rebuilding positions are early or simply catching up to a stock that still trades below most freshly-raised analyst targets.
The post-earnings repositioning is the clearest story in the data. Earnings hit on May 27, the stock gapped 34.7% the next day, and short interest moved sharply in response. Bears added over 21% to their positions across the past week — SI climbed from roughly 17.2 million shares to 20.8 million, now running at 6.2% of the free float. That compares to the 5.9% flagged in the pre-earnings note, and the acceleration is real: most of the move happened in the three sessions after the print, as shorts rebuilt positions into the price strength rather than covering into it. The next FINRA official settlement (through May 15) puts reported SI at 19.5 million shares with 2.68 days to cover — consistent with the estimate trend.
The lending market is not flashing stress. Despite the sharp rise in borrowed shares, availability remains extraordinarily wide — currently above 2,100% of short interest, down from above 3,400% earlier in the week as new borrows hit the tape, but still far into the range where new short positions can be established without friction. Cost to borrow has actually eased this week, dropping 28% to just 0.40% annualised, even as shorts piled in. The combination of rising SI and falling borrow cost is notable: it suggests the lending pool is large enough to absorb the demand with ease. Options positioning has normalised after the pre-earnings spike. The put/call ratio is back to 0.71, barely above its 20-day average of 0.70 — a far cry from the near-4 standard-deviation reading flagged in last week's earnings preview. Hedging demand evaporated with the results.
Analysts are chasing the stock higher in bulk, and that's the sharper story this week. Of the ten analyst actions reported on June 3 alone, seven were target raises and one was an outright upgrade. UBS pushed its target to $370 from $325 while maintaining Buy — the most aggressive of the group and a level that implies roughly 42% upside from the current $261. Piper Sandler, BTIG, Needham, and Loop Capital all moved targets into the $320–$330 range. The lone dissenter tone is Macquarie, which maintained Neutral with a $200 target — well below the current price, a position that looks increasingly isolated. Citigroup had already raised to $320 on May 29 following HSBC's upgrade from Hold to Buy with a target jump to $289 from $176. The mean price target now stands near $287, which is above Tuesday's close of $261 but below where the most bullish desks have moved. That gap — between the consensus target and the most aggressive individual calls — is the Street signalling it believes the re-rating has further to run, but with meaningful dispersion in conviction.
The bull-bear debate is squarely a valuation argument. Bulls point to the 35% post-earnings surge as validation of Snowflake's AI data platform positioning and its consumption-based growth model. Forward EPS momentum ranks in the 88th percentile on a 30-day basis and 81st over 90 days — the estimates revision cycle is clearly moving in one direction. Bears counter with the multiple: the P/E has expanded to nearly 118x on a trailing basis, price-to-book above 30x, and EV/EBITDA at 74.7x even after the one-day pull-back on June 2. The bear case in the data is simple arithmetic — the valuation now demands sustained acceleration in a market where competition from cloud hyperscalers is intensifying and regulatory headwinds on data privacy are not receding. Chairman Frank Slootman sold roughly $109 million of stock on May 29 across multiple tranches — a large and notable disposal, even if it follows the stock's near-doubling over the past month.
The stock's close peers had a mixed week. OKTA and MDB both rallied hard — up 44% and 30% on the week respectively — suggesting a broad post-earnings re-rating across the cloud data space rather than a Snowflake-specific move. NET added 25%. The outlier is ACN, up just 5% on the week, suggesting the lift is concentrated in pure-play cloud names rather than broader IT services. With the next Snowflake earnings date flagged for June 29, the window between now and the next print is short — the key variable to watch is whether analyst targets continue to converge toward the UBS $370 level or whether the Macquarie-style holdouts begin to move, which would tell you something about how durable the consensus re-rating actually is.
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