ONEOK enters September with two forces pulling in the same direction: a wave of analyst target upgrades landing this week, and a sharp reduction in short interest over the past month. The stock gained 4.4% on the week to close at $95.69, and both the Street and the short-seller community appear to be acknowledging that the midstream operator's run has further to go.
The analyst activity this week is the clearest signal. Five separate firms raised their price targets on OKE within 48 hours — a cluster of revisions that is hard to ignore even when the underlying ratings remain cautious. JP Morgan lifted its target to $106 from $95 while holding Neutral. Wells Fargo raised to $106 from $98, keeping Overweight. Jefferies moved to $105 from $95, maintaining Hold. Truist followed at $104 from $93. The pattern is uniform: firms that have been lukewarm on the stock are nonetheless marking up their valuation work, pushing the consensus mean price target to around $99. That implies modest upside from current levels — roughly 4% — but the direction of the Street's thinking is clear. Morgan Stanley's downgrade in late July from Overweight to Equal-Weight at $103 remains a counterpoint, suggesting not everyone bought the rally, but this week's tone is decidedly more constructive.
Short positioning tells a complementary story. Short interest has fallen roughly 15.6% this week alone, dropping to about 3.7% of the free float — its lowest level in the 30-day history visible in the data. The month-long decline has been substantial: shorts have covered more than 4 million shares since early August, when positions were running closer to 28 million shares. Borrowing costs remain extremely low at 0.50%, and availability is generous at around 525% of current short interest, meaning there is no stress in the lending pool. This is not a squeeze story — it is orderly short covering as bears retreat in the face of the price action and the updated analyst work.
Options traders are tilted notably toward calls. The put/call ratio has eased to 0.37, more than one standard deviation below its 20-day average of 0.40, and well below the 52-week high of 0.64. That call-heavy skew has been building steadily since mid-August, when the ratio sat closer to 0.46. It suggests the options market is leaning into the stock's recent momentum rather than hedging against it — a posture that aligns with the short-covering trend. Factor scores offer a nuanced read: the analyst recommendation differential ranks in the 91st percentile, reflecting how much OKE has moved up the Street's agenda, while the short score of 47 and days-to-cover rank of just 2 confirm that bearish structural pressure is minimal.
On valuation, the stock trades at roughly 15.4x earnings and 10.8x EV/EBITDA — multiples that have expanded modestly over the past 30 days as the price rallied. The bull case centres on ONEOK's diversified midstream footprint across the Permian, Mid-Continent, and Rocky Mountain regions, with growth capital deployed into refined products and processing capacity. Bears point to the Bakken exposure as a relative drag versus higher-growth basins, and to the stock now trading near or above several freshly raised targets. BlackRock holds a 10.2% stake and added more than five million shares through July, which adds a meaningful institutional underpin. Peer performance reinforces the week's energy tailwind: CVX gained 5.6% and DVN added 4.6% on the week, broadly confirming sector-level strength rather than a stock-specific move.
With Q3 results scheduled for October 30, the next meaningful test for OKE is whether volume throughput and fee-based revenue growth can validate the multiple expansion that the Street is beginning to price in — and whether the analysts who raised targets this week but kept neutral ratings will eventually follow with ratings upgrades.
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