ESLT is drifting quietly this week — but the more interesting story is how it's holding together while the names around it are falling apart.
The stock edged down just half a percent on the week to ILS 2,327.9, and is up about 3.6% over the past month. That relative steadiness is worth noting in context. The closest TASE-listed peers are taking a beating. ASHO dropped 10% on the week. THES fell nearly 11%. ARYT lost more than 7.5%. IMCO shed 6.2%. Against that backdrop, Elbit's flat-to-slightly-down performance reads as genuine outperformance. US-listed defense names told a different story — NOC and both held up or gained on the week, while was barely changed. The split between Israeli and US defense names this week is the standout.
The lending market offers no real signal here. Availability is extremely loose — shares available to borrow run at roughly 17 times the estimated short interest, and utilization has barely moved above 6%. Cost to borrow ticked up about 6% on the week to 1.29%, but that follows a month-long decline of 14% and remains well within the low single digits. The ORTEX short score is 28.9, in the lower third of the universe, meaning shorts are not leaning hard on this name. Short interest is a fraction of the free float. None of this is the story.
The factor scores tell a more interesting tale about where the stock sits in the market. Elbit scores in the 98th percentile on dividend yield — though the dividend history in the data runs to mid-2022, so that figure likely reflects the current yield rather than recent payment activity. The short score rank of 79 means most comparable stocks carry more short-side pressure, consistent with the thin lending demand. The EPS surprise rank of just 13 is the outlier — it flags that Elbit has not been a consistent beat-and-raise story, at least relative to the broader universe. That sits somewhat in tension with the stock's premium valuation: an EV/EBITDA of 12.1x is not stretched for a defense contractor of this scale, but the price-to-FCF north of 190x (flagged in prior ORTEX analysis) means the valuation leaves little room for execution slips. Analyst data is stale — the most recent consensus dates to May 2026 and the mean price target carries a likely currency mismatch versus the current ILS-denominated price, so no target figure is cited here.
The ownership structure anchors the stock firmly. Federmann Enterprises holds 41.2% of shares, effectively a controlling position. That concentration limits float and constrains the kind of short-side pressure that can build on less tightly held names. Among institutional holders, BlackRock added 53,000 shares and Vanguard added 59,000 in their most recent filings, modest additions but directionally positive. Arrowstreet trimmed 118,000 shares — the largest single reduction among named holders. Insider data is dated to April 2026 and showed clustered executive selling at prices well below current levels, but the gap in time makes it unreliable as a current signal.
The next scheduled earnings event falls in mid-November. The most recent print, on August 11, produced a sharp negative reaction — the stock fell nearly 10% that day and held those losses over the following week. That is the cleanest number in the dataset and worth keeping in mind as the next reporting window approaches. For now, the week's question is whether Elbit's resilience relative to its TASE defense peers reflects genuine differentiation, or simply a lag before the sector weakness catches up.
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