First Busey Corporation heads into its May 20 earnings report with an unusual split in its positioning signals: short sellers have been quietly rebuilding while options traders have shifted to their most bullish stance of the year.
Short interest is the most notable tension here. After spending most of March between 2.7% and 3.3% of the free float, shorts accelerated sharply in mid-April. SI % FF hit 4.76% on April 24 — the highest reading in the 30-day window — before pulling back to 3.71% on April 28. The weekly change is still up 7.2%, and the one-month move is a 35% increase, pointing to a sustained directional build that predates this week's dip. That spike on April 24 stands out: it arrived just ahead of the quarterly earnings announcement on April 28, suggesting some positioning around the print. Borrow conditions remain cheap and unthreatening throughout all of this — cost to borrow is running below 0.5% annualised, and availability in the lending pool is generous, meaning there is no squeeze pressure and new shorts face no friction to build positions.
Options tell a completely different story. The put/call ratio has collapsed to 0.024, more than a standard deviation below its 20-day average of 0.046 — one of the lowest defensive readings of the past year. The 52-week PCR high is 0.185, which makes the current call-heavy skew look striking. This isn't a crowd hedging into a weak print; options activity suggests the opposite. Whether that reflects retail call buying or institutional positioning is unclear from the data alone, but the directional lean is unambiguously upside-oriented.
The Street broadly agrees the stock offers value, though with restrained conviction. Analyst coverage is sparse and cautious. Stephens & Co. initiated with an Equal-Weight and a $27 target in late March, the most recent formal action. Piper Sandler carried an Overweight into early 2026 and raised its target to $29 in January. Raymond James and Keefe, Bruyette & Woods both hold positive ratings with targets in the $26–$29 range. The mean price target is $28.14 against a current price of $25.77, implying just under 9% upside on consensus. Valuation is not stretched — the PE sits at 9.9x and price-to-book is below 1x at 0.93, both consistent with the low end of the regional bank range. The dividend yield factor ranks in the 99th percentile, though the dividend history in the data is stale and cannot be confirmed at current levels. The short score is 38.8, down from a weekly peak of 44.8 on April 24, suggesting the short pressure is easing rather than intensifying.
Insider activity through March deserves a note. On March 26, five C-suite executives — including CEO Van Dukeman — sold shares on the same day, totalling roughly $290,000 in aggregate value at $24.96 per share. The cluster is characteristic of scheduled or plan-driven selling rather than a discretionary exit; the individual values are all small and significance scores are low. A single independent director bought 400 shares three days earlier on March 19. The 90-day net figure shows a positive net of 76,568 shares, though this reflects the broader period and not just March's cluster. None of this looks alarming in isolation, but the CEO sell at the top of a management cluster is worth flagging as background context.
The most recent earnings print reinforced a cautious pattern: the stock fell 2.8% the day after the April 28 announcement, and the prior quarter (January) also closed the day lower. Close peers confirm a sector-wide weight — PEBO, TOWN, and BY all fell between 2.2% and 2.8% on Wednesday alone, suggesting BUSE's weakness was not idiosyncratic. What to watch into May 20 is whether the current short rebuild holds or fades — if SI % FF drifts back below 3% while options stay call-heavy, that convergence would describe a market leaning decisively into the bull case rather than hedging against a repeat of April's post-earnings drop.
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