Goldman Upgrades CIB to Buy as Stock Clears Its Own Price Target

CIB heads into its August 3 earnings report having done something rare: it outran the analysts covering it.

The standout development is Goldman Sachs. On July 28, Tito Labarta upgraded CIB to Buy and lifted the price target to $98 from $81 — a move that arrived just as the stock was already trading through the prior $81 target. The stock closed Thursday at $93.89, up 5% on the day and 8% on the week. Over the past month it has climbed 18%. The Goldman upgrade is the clearest signal that the Street is reassessing a name that has consistently traded ahead of consensus expectations. Other firms have been moving in the same direction: B of A lifted the stock to Neutral in June, JPMorgan raised its target in May, and UBS added $20 to its target in April. The directional drift from analysts has been unambiguously upward since the start of the year.

The bull case rests on momentum. Valuation has re-rated with the price — the price-to-book multiple has expanded by roughly 0.2x over the past 30 days to 1.88x, and the P/E now runs near 8.8x. For a Colombian diversified bank growing revenue at a double-digit pace, that remains a modest multiple. Bears, however, note that the mean consensus price target across all analysts still sits near $72 — well below the current price — suggesting many on the Street have not yet followed Goldman's lead. The most recent earnings print, in February, saw the stock fall 7.6% on the day and nearly 18% over the following five days. That print is a reminder that positive momentum alone does not insulate the stock from a disappointing result.

Options positioning has eased since the defensive spike flagged in our earlier coverage. The put/call ratio closed Wednesday at 0.43, almost exactly in line with its 20-day average of 0.43 and a z-score near zero. The hedging that was visible on July 20 — when the PCR briefly hit 0.65, more than three standard deviations above trend — has unwound. That normalisation likely reflects the stock's continued rally absorbing some of the event anxiety. Short interest reinforces the picture of a largely uncrowded trade: roughly 471,000 shares short, down more than 40% from a month ago, with borrow availability effectively unlimited and cost to borrow running below 0.5%. There is no meaningful short-side pressure in this setup.

The August 3 print will therefore test whether the fundamental delivery — loan growth, net interest margin, credit quality — can justify a stock that has moved sharply past where most analysts told clients to sell.