Accenture heads into its June 25 Q4 earnings report trading at $127.98 — down 18% in a single session on June 18 and nearly 28% over the past month — with the Street still anchoring to targets built for a stock that no longer exists.
The June 18 collapse reset everything. Since then, the data tells a story of exhaustion rather than fresh conviction on either side. Short interest has barely moved — 4.3% of free float, effectively unchanged from the crash session — confirming that bears who built positions through May and early June are sitting on gains rather than adding. The borrow market offers no contrary signal: cost to borrow remains around 0.49% APR and availability runs at over 1,060% of current short interest, meaning there is no shortage of shares to lend and no squeeze dynamic anywhere in the lending pool. Options positioning is similarly inert. The put/call ratio of 0.63 sits just below its 20-day average of 0.64, with a z-score of -0.37 — traders are not rushing to buy downside protection after the fact. The peer group has also been dragged lower: CTSH fell 14.6% on the week, EPAM 17.4%, and 15.6%, suggesting the IT services sector absorbed a broad derating, not just an ACN-specific shock.
The analyst community is still catching up with the new price reality, and the gap between targets and price is both large and misleading. The consensus mean target now reads at roughly $197, against a stock at $128 — but that headline implied upside is a mathematical artifact of targets that haven't yet fully repriced. Post-crash, Evercore ISI cut to $180 from $250 while holding Outperform; Morgan Stanley had already downgraded to Equal-Weight with a $177 target the week before the print. Most of the other targets — Goldman at $270, Wells Fargo at $248, TD Cowen at $258 — were filed when the stock was $60 higher and will need revisiting. The bull case centres on H2 FY26 organic growth re-acceleration of 3.5%+ in constant currency and structural demand for enterprise AI adoption. The bear case is harder to dismiss now: if AI automates the delivery of the very services Accenture sells, the revenue growth ceiling may be permanently lower, and ecosystem-dependent verticals like energy and travel face their own demand questions.
Valuation has re-rated sharply. The trailing P/E has compressed to roughly 9x, and the price-to-book multiple has fallen nearly 0.97x over the past 30 days to 2.3x. The EV/EBIT factor score ranks in the 95th percentile of the universe — deeply cheap by historical standards — but cheap multiples are only a catalyst if growth estimates stabilise. The ORTEX short score of 41.4 sits in the 38th percentile of its sector peers, consistent with moderate rather than extreme short-side pressure.
The June 25 print is therefore less a test of whether Accenture can grow and more a test of whether management can offer a credible forward revenue framework — one that forces the remaining high-side analyst targets to move down, or one that draws a line under the repricing that began well before June 18.
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