AVGO has now shed another 4% since the June 15 stabilisation note, closing Tuesday at $376.71, and the distance between where the Street thinks the stock should be and where the market is actually pricing it keeps growing.
The consensus gap is the central fact here. The mean analyst price target remains at $522 — set largely on June 4, the same day the stock collapsed nearly 20% on earnings. That target implies 39% upside from current levels, a spread that has widened by roughly six percentage points since the previous note. Not a single firm has blinked. JP Morgan's target of $580 and the cluster of $530–$550 calls from Jefferies, Truist, B of A Securities, and Mizuho are all still in place. Macquarie, which broke ranks with a downgrade to Neutral and a $437 target on June 4, now looks closest to the market. The analyst recommendation differential still ranks at the 94th percentile across the ORTEX universe. EPS momentum ranks in the 83rd percentile over 30 days. None of that has translated into price recovery.
The borrow market is telling the same story it has for weeks: there is no short squeeze pressure, and no meaningful wave of new shorts piling in either. Short interest nudged up about 5% on the week to 1.17% of free float — still a low reading by any standard. The lending pool remains effectively unlimited, with roughly 4.5 billion shares available to borrow against just 55 million currently shorted. Cost to borrow dipped to 0.30% on Tuesday, down from 0.42% earlier in the week, and remains among the lowest readings of the past year. This is not a story of shorts pressing a thesis — it is a stock being quietly avoided rather than actively attacked. Options positioning is similarly unremarkable. The put/call ratio is running at 1.11, essentially flat against its 20-day average of 1.12, with a z-score close to zero. Neither puts nor calls are signalling unusual conviction in either direction.
The bull and bear cases have not materially shifted since June 4, but the bear case is compounding time-value. Bulls still point to AI infrastructure demand, Broadcom's secured customer roadmaps, and the argument that the post-earnings collapse was sentiment-driven rather than numbers-driven. The PE multiple has compressed to roughly 24.9x, and EV/EBITDA has dropped to 19.8x — down more than two turns over the past month. Bears focus on the structural angle: Google's reported move to diversify its TPU chip supply away from Broadcom, and the broader shift toward custom accelerators that could pressure both volumes and margins. The insider record adds a small complicating note — the Independent Chairman of the Board purchased 1,000 shares at $373.57 on June 11, a modest but directional signal that at least one insider views current levels as a buying opportunity. Against that, divisional presidents sold over $16 million of stock in April at prices not far above where the stock trades now.
Semiconductor peers have diverged sharply this week. NVDA fell just 0.4% on the week while AVGO dropped nearly 4%. ON managed a small weekly gain. MPWR slipped 2.2%. The relative underperformance is now a pattern, not a single event — AVGO has lagged most of its correlated peers consistently since the June 4 earnings day. That relative weakness, combined with the widening consensus gap, frames the question the market is working through: at what price, if any, does the stock begin to discount the risk the bears are pricing rather than the upside the analysts are targeting.
The next scheduled earnings event is September 3. Between now and then, the market's willingness — or continued reluctance — to close the gap toward the $522 consensus mean is the only meaningful signpost to watch.
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