Texas Instruments reported Q2 results on July 22 after what had been a punishing month, and the stock is now attempting to rebuild from $291.30 — up 2.5% on the day but still down nearly 5% on the week and roughly 10% over the past month.
The analyst response to the print has been swift and broadly constructive. Susquehanna lifted its target from $300 to $340 yesterday, maintaining a Positive rating. Morgan Stanley raised its bear-camp target from $221 to $230 while keeping its Underweight. The gap between those two positions captures the debate precisely: bulls led by Keybanc ($390 target) and TD Cowen ($360) see an analog cycle recovery driving earnings higher; the Morgan Stanley camp argues the stock's valuation — a trailing P/E near 33x and price-to-book above 13x — prices in more than the demand recovery can deliver, particularly given ongoing capex drag and inventory normalisation still unfolding in industrial and automotive channels. The consensus mean target of $307.58 implies modest upside from current levels, though the distribution around it is unusually wide. Notably, the prior earnings print in April produced a 21% single-day gain. Tuesday's more muted 2.5% response suggests the market entered this print with far less pessimism priced in than it did three months ago.
The lending market continues to tell a non-story, which is itself informative. Short interest has drifted lower all month — down roughly 12% over 30 days to just 1.84% of the free float — and availability remains essentially unconstrained, with over 906 million shares available to lend. That backdrop has not changed materially from what the previous notes described. The cost-to-borrow spike to 2.61% on July 17, flagged as a likely transactional anomaly in the pre-earnings preview, has indeed unwound: borrowing costs have dropped back to 0.76%. The ORTEX short score has held in a tight band around 30.1 all week, confirming that bearish positioning is not rebuilding in the wake of results. Options positioning has nudged slightly more defensive — the put/call ratio moved to 0.75 from the sub-0.72 readings of pre-earnings days — but it remains below its 20-day average of 0.78. None of this points to a crowded trade in either direction.
The bull case rests on factor scores that are quietly improving. TXN ranks in the 72nd percentile on 90-day EPS momentum and the 72nd on EPS surprise, reflecting a string of estimate beats. The dividend score ranks in the 97th percentile, supporting the income-oriented holder base that makes up most of the top-ten institutional list — BlackRock holds 8.96% and State Street another 4.7%, with both adding shares in the most recent quarter. The bear case has a simpler structure: the stock has re-rated sharply from its lows, the P/E has compressed only modestly even after the month's selloff, and the capex cycle that weighed on free cash flow through 2024 and 2025 is not yet fully behind the company. On the peer comparison, MCHP fell a similar 4.3% on the week while ADI lost just 2.5% — suggesting TXN is still attracting a slight relative discount among analog names, even post-earnings.
With Q2 now behind it, the next inflection point is management's commentary on order trends and inventory levels at industrial and automotive customers — the data points most likely to determine whether the current analyst target dispersion narrows toward the bulls or the bears.
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