Viking Options Traders Turn Bullish as Shorts Exit

VIK is the story of a stock where options sentiment has sharply reversed, shorts are quietly retreating, and the Street is more uniformly bullish than at almost any point in the company's listed history.

The most dramatic shift since last week's note is in options. Defensive hedging has collapsed. The put/call ratio dropped to 1.02 on June 9 — nearly three standard deviations below its 20-day average of 1.63, making this the most call-heavy reading in months. That is a stark reversal from a period when put buyers dominated the options market on VIK for weeks on end. The 52-week low on the PCR stands at 0.24, so there is room to run further toward outright bullish positioning, but the speed of the rotation is notable — the ratio sat at 1.45 or higher every single session from early May through June 5, then broke sharply lower on June 9.

Short positioning reinforces the same direction. The short interest fell roughly 12% across both the prior day and the prior week, landing at 2.2% of free float — already a low level, and now falling further. With availability at an extraordinarily loose 7,293% of short interest, there is no scarcity of borrow and no structural squeeze pressure; this is simply short sellers reducing exposure. The ORTEX short score has drifted down to 33.9, its lowest level in the 10-day window, consistent with that unwinding. Borrowing costs have crept up 38% on the week to 0.59%, a move worth tracking, but in absolute terms this remains a near-zero cost to borrow — not a signal of any stress in the lending market.

The Street continues to add fuel. Since the previous note, no new analyst actions have landed, but the post-earnings wave through May and early June left the consensus in unusually strong shape: 16 Buy ratings, a mean price target of $98.14 against a current price of $90.31, and the analyst recommendation divergence factor ranking at the 100th percentile of the universe. Bernstein's $120 Outperform initiation remains the high-water mark. Morgan Stanley is the lone notable holdout at Equal-Weight with an $86 target — VIK is already trading through that level. The EV/EBITDA multiple is running near 18x, up modestly on the week, while the P/E has expanded to 24x on the back of a month that added roughly 1.7 turns. EPS surprise ranks in the 75th percentile and forward EPS momentum in the 78th, suggesting the earnings quality supports the re-rating.

Institutional flows show active managers continuing to build. Capital Research added 5.4 million shares in the most recent reported period. BlackRock added 2.2 million. AQR added 3.1 million and Two Sigma added 2.3 million — quant-oriented buyers joining longer-horizon managers. The founder entity, Viking Capital Limited, still holds 52.9% of shares, a concentrated structure that limits the effective float and helps explain why short interest, even at low absolute levels, generates such loose availability readings. On the insider side, a cluster of EVP and CFO sells hit on June 1 — the CEO also participated — but all were small in size, all scored at minimum significance, and the 90-day net insider figure is actually a modest positive at roughly 124,000 shares, suggesting prior-period buying has not been fully unwound.

The next scheduled catalyst is the Q3 earnings report on August 13, nearly ten weeks away. With peers NCLH gaining 5% on the week and MAR adding 5.3%, the broader leisure and hospitality complex is in a supportive macro frame for VIK right now. The stock is up 9.2% over the past month and roughly flat on the week at $90.31. What to watch in the coming sessions is whether the put/call ratio holds below 1.1 — confirming that last Tuesday's drop was a genuine sentiment shift — or snaps back toward the 1.45–1.60 range that characterised most of May, which would suggest the move was one-day noise rather than a sustained repositioning.