Deere & Company lost the relative-strength edge it had built up through the July 4 holiday week, falling nearly 5% to $603.61 as the industrial selloff that spared it last time finally caught up.
The peer comparison is instructive but less flattering than last week. CAT fell 9% on the week — again the hardest hit. CNH dropped 8.4% and OSK shed 7.7%. Against that carnage, Deere's 4.8% decline is not a clean outperformance story. AGCO fell 4.6%, essentially matching Deere step for step. WAB and DOV each lost around 3-4%. The one genuine outlier in the group was , which managed a 4% gain on the week — diverging sharply from the rest of the sector. The relative-strength cushion that made last week's note worth writing has narrowed considerably.
The lending market remains a non-story, and that consistency is itself notable. Availability has actually loosened further since last week — now running at 1,616%, up from roughly 1,551% seven days ago and well above the 52-week tightest reading of 1,223%. There are more than 16 shares available to borrow for every one already lent out. Cost to borrow drifted marginally lower to 0.47%, continuing a month-long easing trend. Short interest ticked up just 0.4% on the week to 2.4% of the free float, and the one-month build of around 17% — while the largest percentage increase in the trailing 30-day window — still leaves the absolute level too low to signal meaningful directional conviction from bears. The ORTEX short score has been flat to slightly declining all week, sitting at 38.6, not far from where it ended June.
The Street's positioning captures the tension cleanly. Truist raised its target to $812 and maintained Buy just last week — a call that now looks stretched with the stock printing $603. JPMorgan sits at Neutral with a $590 target, essentially the current print, while BofA Neutral coverage is anchored near $607. The consensus mean of $646 implies roughly 7% upside from here, but the distribution tells the real story: the bull-bear spread is enormous, with RBC's $752 Outperform target and Truist's $812 sitting against JPMorgan and BofA targets that are barely above spot. The bull case rests on the 24% year-over-year sales surge in Small Agriculture & Turf and a 34% construction segment jump, with the earthmoving order book up 50% from the prior quarter. Bears point to Equipment Operations margins compressing 180 basis points to 5.9%, negative equipment operating cash flow of $1.3 billion, and tariff headwinds that are not fully offset by pricing. The EPS momentum factor ranks at the 64th percentile on a 30-day basis, and the dividend score is a standout at the 98th percentile, but days-to-cover ranks at just the 8th percentile — suggesting the short-side pressure is genuinely minimal even as the valuation debate widens.
Options positioning is not adding much noise. The put/call ratio edged up to 0.96, fractionally below its 20-day average of 0.97, with a z-score of -0.27. That is roughly neutral — neither a defensive hedge nor a speculative lean. The more interesting options observation is the trajectory: through most of May and early June, PCR was running comfortably above 1.0, reflecting hedging pressure. That has unwound steadily over the past three weeks as the stock recovered from its May earnings drop. The May Q2 print delivered a 5.6% one-day decline and a 3.8% five-day loss — the only recent earnings data available, and a reminder that Q3 results on August 20 carry meaningful gap risk.
With the stock now sitting below BofA's target and within striking distance of JPMorgan's, August 20 earnings become the clearest near-term event to watch — particularly whether tariff costs and order book momentum can move the needle enough to close the gap between the cautious Neutral cluster and the more aggressive bull targets.
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