Applied Materials ended the week at $723, up 23% in five sessions — and for the first time in months, the stock has decisively overtaken the mean analyst price target rather than chasing it.
The analyst community has been sprinting to catch up all week. Susquehanna lifted its target from $575 to $900 on Monday. Cantor Fitzgerald moved to $850, and Jefferies raised to $770. B of A Securities, which had only just lifted to $720 the week prior, now finds its target already below the current price. The consensus mean sits near $579 — well below where the stock is trading — which tells a story not about analyst pessimism but about a rally that has simply outrun even the most recently updated targets. Every firm that has moved this week has maintained a positive or overweight rating; there are no downgrades in the recent activity. The bull case centres on AMAT's positioning across the full wafer fabrication stack, its leverage to gate-all-around transitions, and deep ties to TSMC, Intel, and Samsung amid an accelerating AI capex cycle. Bears point to mature-node oversupply and potential market saturation at the high end of the equipment cycle.
Short positioning tells a benign story, and the borrow market offers no friction either way. Short interest at 2.8% of the float is low in absolute terms, though it has risen 42% over the past month — adding roughly 4.4 million shares short into a stock that has gained 61% over the same period. That is short sellers being wrong in size, not a crowded bear trade building momentum. Borrow costs have eased from a 30-day high near 0.52% to 0.39%, reflecting no stress in the lending market. Availability is extremely loose at over 7,700% of short interest — roughly 579 million shares sitting available to borrow against 22.6 million currently lent. The short score of 33.5 sits in the middle of the range and has barely moved this week, confirming this is not a short-driven story in either direction. Options positioning is equally muted: the put/call ratio at 1.01 is fractionally above its 20-day average of 1.00, a z-score of 0.6 — no meaningful hedging demand despite the size of the move.
The valuation has repriced sharply. The trailing P/E has moved from roughly 31x a month ago to 41.6x now, a 10-point expansion in 30 days. Price-to-book has added nearly 4 turns over the same period to reach 15.6x. EV/EBITDA at 35.3x is running slightly below its 30-day average after a modest compression, suggesting the earnings-multiple expansion has been more aggressive than enterprise-value metrics. Factor scores offer limited edge here: EPS momentum ranks in the 66th percentile on a 90-day basis but only the 50th over 30 days, meaning near-term estimate revisions have been less dramatic than the stock move implies. The short score rank of 56 and utilization rank of 71 are both middling — useful confirmation that the move is not being driven by a mechanical squeeze.
The insider picture adds texture. CEO Gary Dickerson and CTO Omkaram Nalamasu both sold stock on June 16 at prices in the $590–$598 range, with Dickerson clearing roughly $20 million across multiple tranches and Nalamasu selling just under $10 million. A divisional president sold a further $6.3 million on June 18 at $633. These transactions happened well below where the stock now trades — the sellers left a lot of the subsequent gain on the table. The net 90-day figure is a positive 199,767 shares, suggesting some offsetting activity, but the recent direction from C-suite names has been consistently toward the exit. That is context to carry into August.
The next earnings event is August 13. Last quarter, the stock moved less than 0.1% on the day but gave back 2.1% over the following five sessions — a pattern of the print being a non-event and the drift afterward doing the damage. With the stock now 23% higher than it was a week ago and already well above the highest recently updated price target, the August print becomes less about confirming growth and more about whether the forward guide can justify a multiple that has expanded faster than the underlying estimates.
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