Intel enters September with its most bullish options skew in months, even as short sellers continue to quietly rebuild positions accumulated over the past two weeks.
The sharpest signal this week comes from options. Call demand has surged relative to puts, pulling the put/call ratio down to 0.88 — nearly two standard deviations below its 20-day average of 0.96. That is the most bullish options reading Intel has generated all year, and it marks a decisive reversal from mid-August, when the PCR was running above 1.00 and closer to the defensive end of the range. The move comes as Intel has clawed back ground, closing at $88.97 on September 1, up 1.7% on the week after falling as low as $87.48 the prior Tuesday. The week's modest recovery has clearly attracted call buyers who were absent during the drawdown.
Short interest, by contrast, tells a more ambiguous story — the same bears flagged in last week's note are still there, and they added a little more. Shorts now hold 138.8 million shares, representing 2.9% of free float, up 16.8% week-on-week and extending the sharp reversal from the mid-August trough of around 116 million shares. The build has been persistent but measured: no single-session spike like the 14.6% one-day jump seen on August 25, but rather a steady grind higher across the final days of August. At under 3% of float, this remains a structurally light short load for a chip bellwether, and the borrow market offers no friction at all — availability is essentially unconstrained, with over 5.2 billion shares in the lending pool. Borrow costs have actually fallen 31% on the week to just 0.24%, making it cheaper than ever for bears to maintain positions. The positioning picture is therefore genuinely split: options traders are leaning bullish while short sellers are still building.
The Street is almost as divided. The consensus has shifted to buy, with 12 analysts on that side of the ledger, but the most recent analyst moves paint a more cautious picture. B of A's Vivek Arya, one of the more prominent bulls on the name, trimmed his price target from $160 to $145 on August 12 while staying at Buy — a signal that conviction remains but the near-term bar has come down. UBS simultaneously cut its Neutral target from $121 to $112. Both moves followed a quarter where Intel beat on gross margins but saw operating profit slip sequentially, a dynamic the bear case leans hard on. The mean price target of around $115 implies roughly 29% upside from current levels, but that figure is pulled higher by a wide dispersion — Morgan Stanley sits at $84, barely above the current price, while some bulls are north of $120. The EV/EBITDA multiple of around 18.4x and a trailing PE of roughly 50x leave little room for further disappointment. Factor scores add some nuance: Intel ranks in the 88th percentile on 90-day EPS momentum, reflecting the sharp recovery in forward earnings estimates over the summer, but only in the 34th percentile on 30-day EPS momentum — meaning the pace of estimate upgrades has stalled more recently.
On the institutional side, the most notable flow is FMR (Fidelity) adding 34.7 million shares as of July 31 — the largest single reported addition among the top holders and a meaningful vote of confidence from a firm with long-horizon positioning. Capital Research also added 10.2 million shares over the same period. The Vanguard picture is more complicated: the original Vanguard Group 13G/A filed in March shows a position that has fallen to zero, while a separate "Vanguard Capital Management" entity filed a new 13G in April showing a 6.52% stake of 327.5 million shares. These appear to reflect a structural reorganisation rather than an outright exit, but the disclosure note applies — stakes are as last reported around the 5% threshold, and the picture may have shifted since April.
The next concrete test is the Q3 earnings report, due October 22. Intel's two most recent quarterly prints both produced one-day drops of around 8-10%, with the weakness extending further over the following week. That reaction pattern matters for how the options market will price into the event as it approaches. For now, the divergence between an increasingly bullish options skew and a short book that is still quietly growing makes Intel one of the more interesting setups in semiconductors — particularly as peers AMD and LRCX each fell 4-8% on the week while Intel held its gains.
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