Shopify enters its June 16 earnings print with the stock down 5.6% on the week and its founder still selling into every recovery.
The insider pattern has not changed since last week's note — it has deepened. Tobias Lütke sold a further 72,000 shares across June 2 and June 3 at prices between $113.53 and $120.46, collecting roughly $10.2 million in proceeds. That brings his disclosed open-market selling to well over $20 million in the past two weeks alone. President Harley Finkelstein added a small sale on June 4. The 90-day net insider figure of about 201,000 shares looks nominally positive, but that number is entirely explained by routine stock award grants to directors that carry zero market value. Every single open-market transaction has been a sale. The cadence — Lütke selling into each price recovery, consistently — is the clearest signal the company is generating ahead of Tuesday's results.
The lending market offers short sellers no friction whatsoever. Availability is essentially uncapped — there are roughly 978 million shares available to borrow against a short interest of just 22 million shares — and borrow costs remain negligible at 0.49%, barely changed on the week. Short interest itself dropped 9% over the past week to 1.8% of the free float, pulling back from the 2.0% level flagged in last week's note. That means shorts are actually reducing exposure heading into the print, not building it. The position is low and loosening, not a source of pressure.
Options positioning tells a similar story of calm rather than alarm. The put/call ratio is 0.52, virtually indistinguishable from its 20-day average of 0.52, with a z-score near zero. There is no unusual demand for downside protection showing up in the options market — a notable contrast to the insider activity, which is anything but neutral. The PCR hit 1.10 at its 52-week high and spent much of late April and early May in the 0.68–0.85 range; the current reading is toward the calm end of that range, close to its 52-week low.
The Street remains broadly positive but has been quietly cutting targets. The most recent round of analyst moves came on May 6 — the day after last quarter's earnings drop — when the consensus across Canaccord, UBS, Citi, Wells Fargo, Barclays, and DA Davidson was to lower price targets while holding ratings unchanged. The mean target now sits at $150, implying roughly 36% upside from the current $110.42. That gap is wide on paper, but the downward revision trend is clear: DA Davidson sliced its target from $195 to $140 in a single move. The EV/EBITDA multiple has compressed to 44x over the past week, and the factor score picture is mixed — EPS momentum and forward earnings growth rank well above average, but value scores near the 10th percentile and the EPS surprise score at just 7 reflects the history of the stock disappointing against high expectations.
That history is directly relevant. The most recent earnings event, reported May 5, produced a 17.3% single-day fall and a 21.7% drawdown over the following five days — the worst short-term reaction in the available data. The stock was trading near $133 before that print; it has since recovered to $110. With Lütke selling actively into each recovery and the Street having already reset targets lower, the June 16 print becomes a question of whether the guidance for the second half can break the pattern of delivering results that trail elevated expectations.
The setup to watch: whether Tuesday's gross profit guidance meets or beats the Street's reset bar, and whether Lütke's selling pace changes materially in the days following the release.
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