SNAP enters the week trading at $5.59, down 3% over five days and nearly 8% lower on the month — and the most interesting tension right now is not the selling pressure itself but the sharp divergence between a short-interest base that is quietly unwinding and an options market that just turned markedly more defensive.
The options signal is the standout this week. The put/call ratio jumped to 0.316 on Tuesday — more than 3.5 standard deviations above its 20-day average of 0.282 — the most lopsided reading in several weeks. That z-score is elevated enough to suggest a genuine defensive repositioning rather than ordinary daily noise. For context, the ratio has traded in a tight band around 0.28 for most of the past month; Monday's move to 0.316 is an abrupt break from that pattern and stands well clear of the 52-week low of 0.216, even if it remains below the year's peak of 0.569.
Short interest tells a meaningfully different story. Bears have been covering rather than adding. SI fell 5.5% over the past week to roughly 7.1% of free float — about 104 million shares — retreating from a recent peak near 119 million in late May. Borrow conditions confirm there is no squeeze pressure: cost to borrow is running at just 0.35%, barely changed on the week. Availability has opened dramatically — it hit 711% on Tuesday, up 25% week-on-week and the most comfortable the lending pool has been all year, against a 52-week low of 184%. That combination — falling SI, cheap borrow, abundant availability — reads as a market where bears are not pressing the trade, even as call holders scale back.
The Street is cautious but not hostile, with the mean price target sitting near $7.63 against the current $5.59 price, implying material upside in absolute terms. The tone after Q1 results in early May, however, was broadly negative. JP Morgan lowered its target to $6 while holding Underweight; Goldman Sachs cut to $7, maintaining Neutral; RBC trimmed to $8. Wells Fargo was the lone voice moving the other way, raising its target to $7 from $6 at Equal-Weight. The overall direction was downward revision, not abandonment — bulls can still point to BMO Capital's Outperform with a $15 target, though that sits well outside the consensus range and deserves a degree of scepticism at current price levels. Factor scores reflect the ambiguity: EPS momentum ranks in the 89th-90th percentile over 30 and 90 days, and the 12-month forward EPS growth factor also ranks near the top of the universe, pointing to improving earnings expectations. But the EPS surprise rank sits at just the 15th percentile, meaning the company has consistently fallen short of consensus on actual delivery — a tension that explains much of why the stock cannot hold ground.
Insider activity provides a further headwind to sentiment. Co-founder Robert Murphy sold $10.6 million worth of shares on May 14 and a further $2 million on May 29. The CFO, General Counsel, and Chief Accounting Officer all sold in mid-to-late May. Net insider activity over the past 90 days totals roughly $32 million in net sales. None of these transactions carry high significance scores — many look like routine scheduled disposals — but the one-directional flow, with no offsetting buys, is a background drag on the narrative heading into Q2 reporting. The ORTEX short score has also drifted lower, declining from around 55 at the end of May to 48.9 as of Tuesday, crossing below the neutral midpoint and erasing the improvement built up since early spring.
RDDT and PINS both gained more than 5% over the same week that SNAP lost 3% — a divergence that underscores the stock-specific nature of SNAP's pressure rather than a sector-wide rotation. The next scheduled catalyst is Q2 earnings on August 5. Between now and then, the key thing to watch is whether the defensive options positioning resolves alongside continued short covering, or whether a fresh catalyst — advertising market data, competitor results, or macro signals on digital ad spending — turns the current cautious hedging into something more committed.
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