BX heads into its July 17 earnings date with short interest climbing sharply, options traders holding a persistently defensive tilt, and the stock up 6.3% on the week — a tension worth unpacking.
The most striking development in the positioning data is the pace of short-side accumulation. Bears have built their position aggressively — short interest has risen 31% over the past month, reaching 2.9% of the free float. That is still a low absolute level, but the speed of the build is notable: shorts added roughly 3 million shares in a single week, taking the position from around 18.4 million shares to 21.5 million. Cost to borrow remains negligible at 0.47%, so this is not a squeeze-pressured environment. Availability is extremely loose at 1,755% — there are roughly seventeen shares available to borrow for every one already lent out, well above the 52-week floor of 1,245% — meaning new short positions can be established without friction. The borrow market is not stretched; it is wide open, and shorts are using it.
Options positioning reinforces the cautious lean without amplifying it. The put/call ratio of 1.53 sits a little above its 20-day average of 1.50 — only about half a standard deviation elevated, nowhere near the extremes of the past year (high 1.87, low 1.18). Puts have persistently dominated BX options flow all year. This is less a sudden defensive shift and more a structural feature of how the Street hedges an alternative asset manager trading at a price-to-book of nearly 11x. The options market is not flashing alarm; it is running at its usual low-grade caution.
The Street's positioning on BX is mixed, with analysts clustered around hold and a handful of outperform ratings. Target cuts followed the April 23 earnings print — Morgan Stanley trimmed from $215 to $184 (Overweight), JP Morgan moved from $142 to $136 (Neutral), and TD Cowen lowered a second time in May, bringing its Buy-rated target to $133. At $127.87 today, the stock has effectively converged with some of those post-cut targets, which narrows the implied upside case. The bull argument centres on Blackstone's scale in private equity, infrastructure, and credit, its fundraising momentum, and a forward EPS growth estimate running north of 295% year-on-year — a figure that earns a top-quartile ranking on 12-month forward EPS growth. The bear case rests on near-term fee headwinds in real estate and credit, and the risk that capital markets activity disappoints in the first half of 2026. With no consensus price target mean available that can be sanity-checked against the current price, the directional read from analyst activity is more useful than any specific target figure.
The recent earnings track record adds context to why options traders stay hedged. The last two quarterly prints — January and April 2026 — both produced negative first-day reactions, with the April result marking a 6.2% single-day drop followed by a further drift to -3.2% over the subsequent week. Peers broadly traded higher this week: KKR gained 3.3%, ARES rose 3.3%, and CG added 3.7% — all lagging BX's 6.3% advance, which puts BX at the top of the alt-asset manager pack for the week. STEP was the outlier, surging 12.2%, suggesting some idiosyncratic flow rather than a broad sector re-rating.
The July 17 print is the next hard catalyst. Between now and then, the combination of a rising short base, loose borrow conditions, and a stock that has just outrun its peers by a meaningful margin sets up an interesting asymmetry — how BX responds to that report, given the two consecutive negative day-one reactions that preceded it, is the number to watch.
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