Seagate Technology Holdings heads into its July 23 earnings report with the Street turning decisively more bullish — even as the stock pulled back 7% on the week and options traders made the sharpest pivot away from puts in over a year.
The most striking data point this week isn't the short book or the borrow market — it's the pace of analyst target upgrades. The Street has become notably more constructive on Seagate over the past month. B of A Securities raised its target to $1,150 on July 1, maintaining a Buy. Cantor Fitzgerald went further, lifting to $1,300 on June 29 while keeping its Overweight. Morgan Stanley moved to $1,035, and JPMorgan to $920 — both Overweight, both raised in the past three weeks. The pattern is consistent: no firm has cut a rating, every revision has been upward, and the cluster of targets now runs from $900 to $1,300 against a stock trading at $965. The consensus mean sits at $948, fractionally below the current price, but the most recent bellwether moves push the implied upside meaningfully higher.
The options market is telling a different story from its recent history. For most of the past month the put/call ratio ran between 2.0 and 2.4 — well above the norm — signalling persistent demand for downside protection. On June 30 it collapsed to 1.43, more than three standard deviations below its 20-day average of 2.12 and the lowest reading of the past year. That is a sharp rotation toward calls in a single session, at odds with the week's 7% price decline. Whether that reflects fresh bullish positioning ahead of earnings or simply the roll-off of existing puts, the shift is abrupt enough to notice.
Short positioning is a sideshow at these levels. Bears hold roughly 3.9% of the free float — down about 5% on the week and more than 2% over the past month, a trend of gradual covering rather than fresh conviction. The borrow market offers no amplifying signal: availability is extraordinarily loose at roughly 6,600% of short interest, meaning there are more than 66 shares available to borrow for every one currently lent out. Cost to borrow jumped sharply to 0.71% on June 30 from 0.29% the prior session — a large relative move, but the absolute level remains negligible. The ORTEX short score of 34 ranks in the 49th percentile, squarely mid-table. There is no squeeze dynamic here, and no sign of a meaningful bear accumulation.
The bull case rests on data centre momentum. Seagate's most recent quarter showed data centre revenue at 79% of the total, with cloud customers driving nearline hard drive demand and free cash flow per share up 281% year-over-year. The earnings history is supportive context: the April print produced an 8% one-day gain and a 29% five-day rally — the largest near-term move in the recent dataset. The bear case centres on shipment volumes that lagged revenue growth, oversupply risk, and an EV/EBITDA multiple of 35x that has compressed around 2.5 turns over the past month even as the stock rallied on a one-month basis. EPS momentum factor scores rank in the 85th and 89th percentiles on 30- and 90-day windows, while the analyst recommendation differential scores in the 98th percentile — the Street is onside at an unusual degree of unanimity.
Closest peer WDC fell 4.8% on the week, broadly in line with STX's move, while SNDK bucked the trend sharply higher at +15.8% — a divergence worth watching as it may reflect NAND-specific news rather than a broader storage read-through. The July 23 print will be the next clean test of whether the analyst upgrade cycle and the options pivot toward calls reflect genuine fundamental re-rating or enthusiasm running ahead of the numbers.
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