Plains GP Holdings heads into its August 7 earnings date with short sellers retreating and the Street finally catching up to where the stock already trades.
The most telling signal this week came from the analyst desk. Truist Securities raised its price target on PAGP to $25 today — essentially in line with the current $25.31 close — after Goldman Sachs upgraded the stock from Sell to Neutral in early June and lifted its own target to $24. The direction of travel across the Street has been uniformly upward: every recent action in the past two months has been a raise or upgrade, with Mizuho running the most bullish target at $27. That unanimous lift cycle is notable, but the targets still cluster tightly around today's price rather than well above it, suggesting the Street sees fair value approximately here rather than a material re-rating. Valuation multiples give a similar read: the P/E sits near 11.3x and EV/EBITDA near 10.1x, both having drifted modestly higher over the past month, consistent with a stable midstream business trading at a modest premium to infrastructure peers.
Short sellers have been quietly backing away. SI has declined roughly 4% over the past week to 7.8% of free float — still a meaningful position, but down from around 8.5% in mid-June when the short book was near its recent peak. The borrow market does nothing to encourage new shorts: cost to borrow is just over 1%, which has actually eased 18% on the week, and availability is running at roughly 197% of outstanding short interest, meaning there is nearly twice as much stock available to lend as there are shares currently borrowed. That is a comfortable lending market, not one signalling any squeeze pressure. The ORTEX short score of 68.5 — holding broadly steady through the past two weeks — captures this picture: elevated enough to flag meaningful bearish positioning, but not accelerating.
Options positioning is unusually one-sided, and not in the bearish direction. The put/call ratio of 0.16 is near the bottom of its 52-week range (low of 0.09, high of 0.50) and has been drifting lower since June. That strongly call-heavy skew implies the options market is not hedging downside here — it reads more like investors using calls for yield or upside participation, consistent with a midstream name held predominantly for income. The factor scores reinforce the income angle: the dividend score ranks in the 86th percentile, well ahead of most peers. The short score rank, by contrast, sits in just the 5th percentile — meaning PAGP is among the least short-favoured names in the universe by that measure, even though absolute SI at 7.8% of float is not trivial.
The peer picture adds context. PAA — Plains All American Pipeline, the 98%-correlated parent — gained 4.1% on the week, slightly outpacing PAGP's 2.7%. Broader midstream names like EPD and OKE were relatively flat to modestly positive, suggesting PAGP's move this week was driven more by Plains-specific sentiment than a sector-wide lift. The last earnings print in May produced a modest next-day dip of 0.5% followed by a five-day recovery of nearly 4%, a pattern worth bearing in mind as the August 7 release approaches.
Overall, positioning looks orderly rather than charged: short sellers are trimming, the borrow market is loose, options favour the upside, and the Street has spent two months raising targets — the next question is whether the August print gives analysts reason to move targets above the current price level for the first time.
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