Three weeks of post-earnings pressure are leaving marks on TJX. The cost to borrow shares has surged. Analyst sentiment has fractured. And the stock is down nearly 8% on the week.
Cost to borrow jumped 79% over the past week to 0.64% — the sharpest climb since early August. That follows the earnings miss on August 19, which sent the stock down 6.7% on the day.
In absolute terms, 0.64% remains low. The borrow market is anything but constrained — availability is extraordinarily loose, with over 1 billion shares available to lend. Short sellers face no structural barrier to adding positions. The CTB spike reflects rising demand for borrows, not a supply squeeze.
Citigroup's Paul Lejuez moved TJX to Neutral on August 20. His target dropped 15% to $154 — implying 9% downside from the $140.69 close at the time of the call. That reversed a prior Buy with a $182 target, one of the more dramatic single-analyst reversals in the post-earnings response.
The rest of the Street largely held firm on ratings but trimmed targets. Morgan Stanley stayed Overweight at $178. Barclays held Overweight at $188. Wells Fargo made the sharpest revision among the holders, cutting to $140 — right at current levels. UBS was the lone firm moving in the other direction, lifting its Buy target to $198.
Gordon Haskett stepped down from Buy to Accumulate with a $155 target.
The overall consensus remains Buy. Fourteen analysts carry that rating, with five Outperform and two Holds. The mean target is $172.80 — roughly 23% above Friday's $140.53. That gap between consensus optimism and where the stock is trading is the central tension.
One development worth noting: the put/call ratio has dropped to 0.67, now 1.6 standard deviations below its 20-day mean of 0.84. That's a reversal from the heavily defensive options posture seen ahead of earnings, when the PCR exceeded 1.0 for several consecutive sessions. Protective hedging appears to have cleared. Call activity is now dominant relative to recent norms.
Short interest is 1.77% of free float — up 15% over the past month but still a low absolute level carrying no squeeze risk. The next earnings date is November 18. Between now and then, the key question is whether the $140 level — where Wells Fargo's target now sits — holds as support, or whether the post-earnings analyst reassessment continues to weigh.
Data summary
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