LyondellBasell enters July under heavy selling pressure, down 21% in a single month to $52.65, with short sellers accelerating bets against it and the Street cutting targets across the board.
The most striking development this week is how quickly short positioning has built. Short interest jumped 24% over the past week to 4.5% of free float — and is up 35% over the past month, reaching roughly 14.5 million shares. The speed of accumulation is the story: bears added around 3.7 million shares in just the four sessions between June 19 and June 25. Despite that build, the borrow market remains almost entirely unconstrained. Availability is running at over 2,700% — meaning there are more than 27 shares available to borrow for every one currently lent out. Cost to borrow has also eased sharply, down 76% over the past month to under 0.4%, back near the cheapest levels of recent history. There is no squeeze pressure here. Shorts are building into a wide-open lending pool.
Options positioning reinforces the defensive mood. The put/call ratio hit 1.82 on Tuesday — the highest reading in the past year is 1.87, touched just last week — and is running well above its 20-day average of 1.54. At 1.65 standard deviations above that mean, this is the most bearish options configuration LYB has seen all year. Peers tell a consistent story: fell nearly 10% on the week, dropped 7.6%, and lost 4.4%. The selling is sector-wide, not idiosyncratic.
The analyst community has moved in near-lockstep to cut numbers. BofA Securities lowered its target to $48 — the most bearish on the Street among recent movers — while maintaining its Underperform rating. Mizuho trimmed to $62 from $76. Citi cut to $67 from $80 just last week, even while keeping a Buy. The mean price target across the Street is $74.47, implying roughly 41% upside from current levels, but with targets falling this rapidly that gap is more a reflection of lag than conviction. The bear case centres on deteriorating margins in North American olefins and polyolefins, where ethylene spreads have narrowed, combined with ongoing weakness in industrial and downstream segments. Bulls point to 90-day forward EPS momentum — which ranks in the 96th percentile — and a dividend yield factor that scores 82 out of 100. The short score of 39 places LYB in the bottom third of the universe on short-squeeze risk, consistent with a stock where bears face little structural friction.
Institutional ownership adds a note of complexity. Access Industries, the controlling shareholder, trimmed by 850,000 shares in the March quarter but still holds nearly 20% of the company. FMR and Davis Selected Advisers each added material positions recently — FMR by 1.7 million shares, Davis entering with 5.6 million. These are value-oriented buyers stepping in as the stock falls. The insider picture is less telling: the most recent trades on record were a cluster of small board-level equity plan sales in late May at $69.72, now well above the current price. The 90-day net insider figure is modestly positive, but those transactions carry little signal given their size and automatic nature.
Q1 results in May produced a 1.9% one-day gain before the stock faded 3.8% over the following five sessions — a pattern of relief followed by renewed pressure. Q2 results are due July 31. With short interest still building, options near annual extremes on the bearish side, and analysts still revising targets lower, the July 31 print becomes the next moment at which the direction of the short build — and the validity of those $48–$67 targets — will be tested against the actual margin data.
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