GameStop closes the week at $22.28 — up 6.5% on the week — yet the most striking data point isn't the price recovery. It's the gap between what options traders did on Tuesday and what short sellers have refused to do all month.
The options market sent an unmistakable signal on June 9. The put/call ratio hit 0.56, more than 4.3 standard deviations above its 20-day mean of 0.32 — the highest reading in over a year, and a level that arrived with extraordinary speed. Through all of May, the PCR sat in a tight 0.29–0.31 band. In two sessions it nearly doubled. The catalyst was the investor call, which produced no concrete news on capital deployment. Ryan Cohen sits on roughly $6.4 billion in cash while the core business continues to shrink. Options traders, having waited through the June 2 earnings beat and the subsequent $2 billion buyback announcement, appear to have repriced downside risk when the call delivered nothing new. That reading has since partially unwound — the June 8 PCR was back at 0.31 — which makes the June 9 spike look more like a one-session hedge than a sustained shift in sentiment.
Short interest tells a completely different story, and the contrast is the defining feature of this week's setup. Bears are not moving. Short interest holds at 13.0% of free float — around 58.2 million shares — essentially flat over the past week and down only modestly from the mid-May peak near 70 million shares. Cost to borrow is negligible at 0.64%, up a marginal 3.7% on the week but roughly a quarter of its early-May level. Availability has actually loosened, moving from around 67% a week ago to 77.6% now — well above the 52-week floor of 1.4% and moving in the wrong direction for anyone hoping for squeeze pressure. The borrow market is not stressed. Short sellers are sitting on a position of meaningful size and comfortable economics, apparently unconvinced by either the earnings beat or the buyback authorization.
The Street view remains one-sided in a specific way. The only active coverage is Wedbush's Michael Pachter, who has held an Underperform rating continuously and most recently maintained a $13.50 target — last updated in June 2025, making that figure over a year stale against a stock now trading at $22.28. The gap between that target and the current price is wide enough to note a caveat: the target reflects a fundamental view on a business that has since reported a record quarter and announced a major buyback. The bull case rests on the gross margin improvement to 34.5%, the collectibles revenue surge of 54.6% year-over-year, and $1.5 billion in convertible note proceeds that have now grown into a substantial cash pile. The bear case is structural: hardware sales fell 31.7% year-over-year, software fell 26.7%, and the industry's secular shift to digital distribution has not reversed. The ORTEX short score of 74.7 places GME in the top tier of bearishly positioned names universe-wide, while the factor scores tell their own story — a short score rank in the 5th percentile and days-to-cover rank also at the 5th percentile reflect how concentrated and persistent the bear case has become.
Institutional activity adds one note worth flagging. Dimensional Fund Advisors added 2.6 million shares as of late May — their largest reported change in the dataset — while Renaissance Technologies built a position of 2.65 million shares, up from essentially nothing. Neither position is large in absolute terms, but both firms are quantitatively driven. Their presence in the register, coinciding with the short position's gradual reduction from peak levels, is at minimum a data point that the fundamental shorts are not the only players paying attention.
The next earnings event is scheduled for July 7. After the June 2 print moved the stock nearly 4% on the day and held a 4.3% gain over five days, the question heading into that release is whether the buyback authorization will show any execution — and whether Cohen's cash deployment posture will shift. The PCR spike that followed the investor call's silence is the clearest signal yet that the market's patience with the capital-allocation question has a finite horizon.
See the live data behind this article on ORTEX.
Open GME 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.
