HPQ enters July with a bruising month behind it — down 19% over 30 days to $21.94 — and shorts sitting on their largest positioning in months, even as the borrow market stays remarkably relaxed about the whole thing.
The short interest story is the core tension here. Bears hold 9% of the free float, a level that has barely moved this week (up just 1.2%) but tells a very different story over a longer horizon. Back in early June, short interest was running above 110 million shares — roughly 30% more than today's 84.5 million. That sharp unwind through mid-June means the current 9% reading reflects a position that has already been substantially trimmed, not one that is freshly building. The borrow market corroborates the lack of urgency: availability is a comfortable 311%, meaning there are roughly three shares available to borrow for every one already shorted — well above the year's tightest point of 239% recorded on June 10. Cost to borrow has drifted around 0.5%, essentially unchanged. The lending market is not flashing any squeeze signal.
Options positioning is similarly calm, but with a subtle tilt. The put/call ratio has crept up to 0.70 this week, slightly above its 20-day average of 0.67, though the z-score of 0.76 is well within normal range. Notably, the PCR was running above 0.90 throughout May — so the recent drift lower actually represents a modest easing of defensive positioning, not a fresh build. The 52-week high on that ratio is 1.66, which underscores how contained the hedging activity remains relative to peak concern. Overall, the positioning picture looks cautious but not crowded: short sellers have been reducing, not adding, and options traders have pulled back from the more defensive stance they held a month ago.
The Street is harder to read as bullish right now. After HPQ's late-May earnings print — which delivered a +17% single-day move — analysts lifted targets across the board. Goldman Sachs raised to $19 on June 2 while maintaining its Sell rating. JPMorgan, Citi, UBS, and TD Cowen all moved targets higher in the $25-$26 range immediately post-earnings, yet held at Neutral. Barclays, Wells Fargo, BofA, and Morgan Stanley raised targets while keeping Underweight or Underperform ratings. The consensus is Hold, with nine Hold ratings against six negative-skewed ones and a mean target of $22.91 — only marginally above the current price of $21.94. That tight gap between target and price, combined with the preponderance of cautious ratings from bellwether names, suggests the Street sees limited upside even after the post-earnings rally has fully reversed. Valuation is objectively cheap: the P/E is running at 7.8x and EV/EBITDA near 6.3x, down about 0.8 turns over the past month as the price has fallen. The ORTEX short score has ticked up to 57.7 from 55.5 two weeks ago — not alarming, but a gradual drift in the wrong direction.
Among close peers, the week's moves have been divergent. DELL closed up 4% on the day and held broadly flat on the week, while HPE tracked HPQ almost exactly with a -7.8% weekly decline. LOGN performed worst of the group, off nearly 11% on the week. The correlation to DELL at 71% makes the divergence in daily performance worth watching — HPQ and HPE appear to be absorbing sector-level pressure that DELL sidestepped.
The next scheduled catalyst is the Q3 earnings release on August 27. Given that the post-May-earnings rally has fully unwound and the stock is now trading below the levels that preceded that beat, the question heading into the summer is whether the fundamental improvement the Street credited in late May still holds — or whether the macro and PC-demand backdrop has deteriorated enough to erase the optimism that briefly lifted the stock to $26.
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