McKesson Corporation enters the back half of June with its short-interest rebuild plateauing and analysts cutting price targets even as they hold constructive ratings — a split that frames the next earnings print on August 5 as the key resolution point.
Short interest has pulled back modestly from last week's peak but remains near its highest level in months. The June 16 estimate puts shares short at roughly 4.82 million, equivalent to 3.9% of free float — down from a mid-week high above 5 million but still nearly double the level recorded in early May. Importantly, nothing in the lending market suggests stress. Availability runs at roughly 3,935% — meaning for every share currently borrowed, there are roughly 39 still available to lend. Borrowing costs remain low at under 0.5% per annum, and they actually edged down on the week. This is short conviction, not short pressure. The borrow market is so loose that the rebuild could extend or reverse without any mechanical friction. Options traders remain relaxed: the put/call ratio is running just below its 20-day average at 0.57, near the cheapest end of its 52-week range, signalling no incremental demand for downside protection.
The Street has spent the past five weeks trimming targets while keeping positive ratings intact — a pattern that signals cautious support rather than conviction buying. Barclays lowered its target to $925 from $1,050 on June 10 while maintaining an Overweight. JP Morgan, Citi, Wells Fargo, and Evercore all made similar moves following the May earnings print — cuts in the range of 8–12%, but no rating changes. The lone outlier was UBS, which raised its target to $1,050 from $1,000 in the same period, keeping its Buy. The consensus mean price target sits at $941, roughly 20% above the current price of $785. That gap is notable, but context matters: a string of downward revisions from the $1,000–$1,100 range has compressed it steadily. The forward P/E near 16.7x and EV/EBITDA at 12.8x are modest for a business with 90-day EPS momentum scoring in the 82nd percentile. On EPS surprise, the company ranks in the 77th percentile. The weak spot is forward growth: the 12-month forward EPS year-on-year growth factor scores in the 18th percentile, which likely explains why bulls and bears are converging on the same stocks but from different angles.
Insider activity reinforces that cautious tone. The CEO sold 4,929 shares on June 9 for roughly $3.76 million. The Chief Legal Officer, Chief Strategy Officer, and HR Director all sold in the last two weeks of May, collectively realising several million dollars. The net 90-day position across all insiders is actually a modest positive — $14.3 million net sold across the period, with awards mixed in — but the directional signal from active open-market sales by senior leadership is consistent with a management team that sees the stock as fairly to fully valued at current levels. No purchases are in the recent record.
The most closely correlated peer, CAH, gained 7.1% on the week against MCK's near-flat 0.2% — a meaningful divergence among names that typically track each other. COR was essentially unchanged on the week. The lagging performance relative to Cardinal Health may reflect investor preference for names with cleaner near-term earnings catalysts, or simply rotation within a sector that has been broadly supported by defensive healthcare flows.
The August 5 earnings date is now the cleanest focal point: prior prints have produced muted same-day reactions (the May 2026 print moved -1% on the day before recovering to flat on the week), and the setup heading into Q1 results will be shaped by whether that short-interest plateau resolves higher or lower and whether the gap between current price and the Street's $941 mean target begins to close.
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