Akamai Technologies heads into the week with its most defensive options positioning in months, even as short sellers appear less aggressive than the headline short interest figure implies.
The options market delivered the clearest signal on Monday. The put/call ratio jumped to 0.62 — more than 2.7 standard deviations above its 20-day average of 0.38 — the sharpest defensive lean seen in the past year, closing in on the 52-week high of 0.71. That spike landed on the same day the stock fell nearly 5%, extending a 7.9% weekly loss to close at $141.87. The move looks like a deliberate hedge rather than a routine bleed: for most of the prior three weeks the PCR held well below 0.40, meaning Monday's print represents a genuine shift in how options traders are leaning into this name. The next earnings print is not until August 4, so this isn't pre-earnings protection — it's a reaction to something already in motion.
The positioning story from the lending market is more nuanced. Short interest is elevated at 13.1% of free float, up roughly 8% over the past month as shorts rebuilt positions steadily from mid-May. Yet the borrow market itself tells a less pressured story. Cost to borrow has drifted lower over the past month to just 0.46% — near the bottom of its recent range — and availability is actually loosening rather than tightening, running at roughly 337% of outstanding short interest. That means for every share currently borrowed short, more than three additional shares are available to lend. Short sellers are not scrambling to establish positions; borrowing this name is cheap and easy. The ORTEX short score of 58.7 has also eased slightly from a peak of 60.4 at the end of May, suggesting the near-term momentum behind the short thesis may be softening even as the absolute level of short interest remains high.
The Street sits broadly constructive but at a clear distance from the current price. After a strong Q1 earnings beat in early May that sent the stock up 21% in a single session, analysts moved aggressively: Morgan Stanley's Keith Weiss raised his target to $165 while maintaining Overweight, and Bank of America upgraded to Buy with a $175 target — both within the past month. Targets from Susquehanna, Scotiabank, Guggenheim, and Keybanc all moved into the $165–$195 range. The consensus mean sits at $157.89, roughly 11% above Monday's close. With analyst recommendation differentiation ranking in the 98th percentile of the ORTEX universe, the Street is unusually aligned on the bull side. The bull thesis centres on Akamai's $1.8 billion deal with a frontier AI model provider and its pivot toward cybersecurity and cloud, which together handled over 20% of global internet traffic in its CDN operation. Bears counter that CDN revenue is expected to decline in 2026, the AI partnership raises capital expenditure, and operating margin faces compression as the company funds the transition. EV/EBITDA has compressed to 13.1x over the past week — down roughly half a turn — while the PE has slipped to 20.5x, both reflecting the recent price weakness rather than any fundamental re-rating.
Institutional ownership offers little drama. BlackRock is the largest holder at 7.2% and added around 92,000 shares in the most recent filing. Dimensional Fund Advisors added 694,000 shares. Point72 trimmed roughly 496,000 shares in Q1. The insider register is quiet near-term; recent activity amounts to routine director stock awards with zero cash consideration, and the last material open-market sales by executives date to mid-March at prices around $106–$108 — well below current levels, suggesting insiders did not sell into the May earnings spike.
The gap between what options traders paid for downside protection on Monday and what sell-side analysts have written since the May earnings beat is the tension worth watching into August. The August 4 print will need to show that the AI partnership revenue is materialising and that cybersecurity growth is genuinely offsetting CDN pressure — those two data points, more than any positioning signal, are what will resolve the divergence between a cautious options market and an unusually bullish analyst consensus.
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