Block, Inc. heads into its August 5 earnings report with the analyst community making a decisive move higher on targets this week — while the short unwind that began in late June has now run its course, leaving positioning genuinely clean.
The Street upgrade cycle has accelerated sharply. BMO Capital and Cantor Fitzgerald both raised targets on July 22, to $85 and $95 respectively, maintaining their ratings. Citigroup moved first last week, lifting its target from $100 to $115 with a Buy intact. Barclays initiated coverage at Overweight with a $100 target on July 8. Piper Sandler's June 30 upgrade — from Underweight all the way to Overweight, with a target that nearly doubled from $58 to $100 — was the sharpest signal of the turn. The consensus target now sits at $92.65 against a current price of $80.38, a gap of roughly 15%. The direction of travel has been consistent: nearly every recent action raised targets, and none cut. The one note of caution is that the $115 Citigroup target looks like an outlier relative to the cluster between $85 and $100, though the overall message is clearly constructive.
The bull case centers on Block's trajectory toward $2.8 billion in gross profits — a 22% year-on-year lift — and a Cash App user base now at 59 million monthly transacting actives. Bears point to take rate compression, the competitive threat from OS-native wallets, and BNPL regulatory exposure as drags on revenue quality. Valuation multiples have been creeping higher: the P/E has risen by just over one turn on a 30-day basis to around 17.7x, and price-to-book has added 0.15 over the same period to 1.9x. Those are not stretched readings, and they reflect a market willing to pay slightly more but not yet pricing in the more optimistic analyst scenarios. Factor scores are middling — analyst recommendation differential at the 46th percentile, short score rank at the 54th — suggesting the setup is balanced rather than extreme in either direction.
The short-side story continues the retreat described in last week's note. Short interest has edged down further to 2.66% of the free float — roughly 14.6 million shares — completing a decline from over 21 million at the June 26 peak. The month-on-month drop is now 26%. Borrow conditions remain exceptionally loose: availability has actually expanded further this week to over 7,000% of short interest, meaning there are more than 364 million shares available to lend against fewer than 15 million currently borrowed. Cost to borrow is running at just 0.46%, its lowest point in this data window and an essentially frictionless level. The ORTEX short score has held near 33 all week, flat and untroubled. Options lean slightly the other direction from the shorts — the put/call ratio at 0.52 is running nearly two standard deviations below its 20-day average of 0.54, pointing to call-side appetite rather than defensive positioning. Taken together, positioning looks unusually clean ahead of a binary event.
Director Anthony Eisen has been a consistent seller throughout this period, logging daily sales of around 6,000 shares at prices between $78 and $82 over the past two weeks, with a larger block of 135,000 shares sold on July 15 at prices between $82.50 and $84. The total value across these trades runs into the tens of millions of dollars. The sales look consistent with a pre-arranged plan rather than a reactive decision — the cadence is mechanical — but the aggregate size is worth noting against a backdrop of rising analyst targets and a stock near year-highs. On the institutional side, T. Rowe Price added over 2 million shares as of June 30, and Capital Research added 4.6 million — meaningful flows from names that tend to move with conviction. Jack Dorsey's 8.1% stake remains unchanged.
Earnings history on XYZ is mixed but not dramatic: the May 7 print produced a 5.7% next-day gain that faded to less than 1% over five days, while the June event saw a 2% one-day drop that extended slightly over the following week. The August 5 release is therefore the next decisive moment — what the Street will be watching for is whether Cash App's user growth and gross profit trajectory can justify the target upgrades that have been piling in ahead of the print.
See the live data behind this article on ORTEX.
Open XYZ on ORTEX →ORTEX Market Intelligence content is generated by AI from a snapshot of ORTEX's proprietary data. Content is informational only and does not constitute investment advice.
