GTLB enters the week of its next scheduled event — June 17 — with short sellers adding rather than retreating, even as the stock gave back ground following last week's Q1 beat.
The short interest story has shifted since the prior notes. After settling in the low 13–14% range immediately post-earnings, bears have quietly rebuilt. Short interest climbed to 14.2% of the free float as of June 9, up 5.3% on the week and 30% over the past month. That puts the position back near pre-earnings highs. The move is notable because it happened while the stock fell 4.8% on the week to $30.30 — meaning shorts added into weakness, not into a rally. That's a different dynamic than the pre-earnings build documented in earlier notes, where bears pressed a rising stock. The borrow market itself offers no friction: availability is extraordinarily loose at roughly 1,120% of short interest, meaning there are more than eleven shares available for every one already lent out. Cost to borrow is a modest 0.44%, little changed on the week. Nothing in the lending pool forces a cover.
Options positioning has, however, rotated away from the defensive extreme seen in early June. The put/call ratio is back below its 20-day average at 0.38, running about 0.8 standard deviations below the mean — the opposite of the 2.96 sigma spike recorded on June 3. That prior burst of protective buying has not been renewed. Options traders appear less anxious now than they were immediately after earnings, even though the June 17 catalyst is one week closer. That divergence — shorts rebuilding, options calming — is the clearest tension in the setup right now.
The Street's reaction to the Q1 beat remained consistently cautious. The flood of target raises on June 3 — JPMorgan lifted to $32 from $28, UBS moved to $32 from $24, Morgan Stanley nudged to $30 from $29, with several others following — left the consensus mean around $33.60. The stock is at $30.30. That implies modest upside on paper, but the ratings tells the fuller story: virtually every firm that moved sits at Neutral, Hold, or Sector Perform. Rosenblatt's Buy at $43 is the clear outlier. Bulls point to GitLab's all-in-one DevSecOps positioning and the FY27 guidance raise to $1.112–$1.118 billion. Bears point to GitHub's competitive weight and the structural questions raised by exiting 22 countries and cutting 14% of staff — a workforce reduction that reads less like efficiency and more like a company resizing its ambitions. The EPS momentum factor score is strong at 79 on a 30-day basis, and the forward earnings upgrade cycle is real. But the analyst recommendation differential ranks in the seventh percentile — meaning the consensus skew toward neutral or negative is among the most cautious in the software universe.
Earnings history adds one concrete data point. The June 2 Q1 print produced an 8.5% one-day decline and a 10.3% five-day drop. The prior Q4 report in March resulted in a 4.4% one-day fall and 11.5% over five days. Both recent prints were negative on the day, and both steepened over the following week. The June 17 event is therefore arriving with a consistent pattern of post-report selling pressure, even when results beat estimates.
Availability is ample, borrow is cheap, shorts are adding, and options hedgers have stepped back — the setup heading into June 17 is one where bears hold a well-funded position without obvious covering pressure, while the options market has yet to reprice the risk of another negative tape reaction.
See the live data behind this article on ORTEX.
Open GTLB on ORTEX →ORTEX Market Intelligence content is generated by AI from a snapshot of ORTEX's proprietary data. Content is informational only and does not constitute investment advice.
