Good Times Restaurants heads into its May 7 Q2 earnings report with short interest swinging wildly and options positioning suddenly more skewed than it has been in months.
The most arresting signal this week is in options, where the put/call ratio has jumped to its highest relative level in recent memory. At 0.0304, the PCR is running more than three standard deviations above its 20-day average of 0.012. In absolute terms the ratio remains low — this is a thinly traded micro-cap where call volumes are sparse — but the spike in relative terms is notable. It points to a sudden burst of downside protection demand ahead of the May 7 print, even if the raw numbers remain modest.
Short interest tells a messier story. Estimated shares short nearly doubled between April 17 and April 24, jumping from roughly 17,000 to 55,000 — a 61% week-on-week rise. Yet that jump follows a steep unwind from mid-March, when short positions were running above 120,000 shares. The net result: SI has landed back at 0.51% of the float, which is a very low absolute level. At under 1% of float, this is not a heavily shorted stock by any measure. What's interesting is the volatility of the positioning rather than its size. Availability in the lending market remains loose, with borrow costs at 3.82% APR — off their late-March peak near 6.1% and drifting sideways for the past two weeks. That loose borrow environment means there is little mechanical pressure building on either side.
On the fundamentals, the Q1 result reported February 5 offered little to get excited about. Revenue fell to $32.7 million from $36.3 million a year earlier. Net income ticked up slightly to $0.18 million, and earnings per share held flat at $0.02 diluted. The valuation snapshot reflects that modest picture: EV/EBITDA is running near 3x, which is undemanding but not surprising for a micro-cap chain still navigating a weaker consumer backdrop. No formal analyst coverage is evident in the data. There is no price target to anchor upside or downside framing here — the stock trades on its own.
Ownership is concentrated and largely static. Charles Jobson holds approximately 18.4% of shares outstanding, with the Jobson Family Foundation adding another 3.1%. Vanguard and Renaissance Technologies hold smaller passive stakes. Insider activity in the data has been quiet for the better part of six months — the most recent trade on record is a small stock award to CEO Ryan Zink in November 2025, with no open-market transactions since director Jason Maceda bought in May 2025 at prices around $1.58–$1.60. At the current price of $1.26, those director buys are underwater.
The Q1 earnings reaction data shows a muted post-print history: the stock fell 0.81% the day after the February result and drifted another 2.4% lower over the following five days. That pattern — small immediate drop, continued drift — frames what to watch on May 7: whether the Q2 revenue trajectory stabilises after a year-on-year decline, and whether the options positioning spike this week proves to be prescient or simply noise in a very illiquid book.
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