Occidental Petroleum heads into the final week of August with options traders unusually bullish, short sellers retreating, and analysts still broadly constructive — yet the stock fell 2.8% on Tuesday, underperforming a sector that was broadly weak.
The most striking tension in the data right now sits in options positioning. Call demand has rarely been this dominant relative to puts. The put/call ratio has dropped to 0.47, nearly two standard deviations below its 20-day average of 0.49 — and close to the lowest reading in the past year. That is an unusually skewed setup: investors are reaching for upside exposure rather than hedging downside risk. The move is notable against the backdrop of Tuesday's price decline and a week where close peers like APA fell 3.7% and DVN slipped 1.9%. OXY's call-side lean looks more like conviction than complacency, but it has yet to produce returns this week.
Short interest tells a less aggressive story, and that is the right framing. Bears have been stepping back steadily. Short interest as a percentage of free float has dropped from roughly 2.7% in mid-July to 2.2% now — a fall of about 17% over the past month. At these levels, short selling is not a meaningful driver in either direction. What is worth flagging is the cost to borrow, which has more than doubled in a week — from around 0.28% to 0.54%. That spike is unusual for a stock this liquid, but it remains trivially cheap in absolute terms. Availability is effectively uncapped, with well over 995 million shares available to lend, so the CTB move reflects noise in the lending tape rather than any squeeze dynamic. The ORTEX short score of 31 confirms there is no meaningful short-side pressure building.
The Street remains broadly bullish, though the direction of recent moves has been mixed. After a flurry of target upgrades following August earnings — Wells Fargo lifted its target to $79 and Susquehanna moved to $70 — Barclays pulled its own target back from $75 to $71 while keeping an Overweight rating, suggesting at least some caution about near-term momentum at current prices. The consensus mean target of $66.83 implies roughly 14% upside from Tuesday's close of $58.41, which is a meaningful gap. Bulls point to OXY's debt-reduction trajectory, carbon management optionality, and CO2 flooding expertise. Bears flag the company's sensitivity to oil prices and a balance sheet that still constrains growth investment. The EPS surprise factor score of 74 suggests the company has been beating estimates more often than not, though the 12-month forward EPS growth score of just 14 reflects limited near-term earnings expansion.
The institutional picture is anchored by Berkshire Hathaway's 26.5% stake — a holding that has been static recently but continues to provide a backstop narrative for long-only investors. On the insider side, the 90-day net position is modestly positive at roughly 85,000 shares net bought, though the picture is complicated: CEO Vicki Hollub sold around $4.4 million of stock in June, while Richard Jackson, also carrying a President/CEO designation, purchased $250,000 at $52.38 in late June. The Hollub sale was the larger transaction but registered a significance score of just 1, suggesting it was likely a planned disposal rather than a directional signal.
The next earnings date is November 11. Between now and then, the setup worth watching is whether the bullish options skew holds as energy peers remain under pressure — or whether the call-side lean begins to unwind if oil prices soften further.
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