Broadcom's Bears Stay Quiet as the Stock Slides

AVGO is now down more than 12% over the past month, yet every data point in the positioning landscape points the same direction: the bears are not pressing their advantage.

The clearest signal comes from short interest, which has continued its quiet grind lower through the week. SI as a percentage of the free float fell to 1.09% on September 15, down from 1.16% at the start of the month and still well below the summer peak around 1.50%. That is a remarkably thin short book for a stock in the middle of a double-digit drawdown. Borrowing remains almost trivially cheap at 0.50%, and the borrow market is loose — availability is running near 890% of short interest, meaning shares to borrow vastly outnumber shares already borrowed. There is simply no friction in the lending market that would suggest a new bear trade is building.

Options traders are leaning the same way. The put/call ratio has eased to 0.60, sitting more than one standard deviation below its 20-day average of 0.74 — well towards the constructive end of the past year's range, where 0.44 is the floor and 1.66 was the peak defensive reading. That puts options positioning in mild-bullish territory: call demand is running ahead of put demand relative to recent norms. The combination of a shrinking short book, cheap borrow, loose availability, and below-average put/call ratio all tell the same story — positioning looks constructive rather than defensive, even as the stock itself has been anything but.

The Street reinforced that view following the September 3 earnings print. A wave of target upgrades arrived on September 4, with Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, JPMorgan, UBS, Barclays, Needham, Wells Fargo, and Stifel all lifting numbers. Targets now cluster between $210 and $300, reflecting broad consensus that the post-earnings selloff — where AVGO fell roughly 3.5% the day after results and another 1.3% over the following week — was an overreaction to macro noise rather than a fundamental reset. The ORTEX stock score supports that framing: quality leads all pillars at 88.4, growth contributes meaningfully at 79.2 underpinned by strong forward EPS momentum, and the short score of 19.6 (ranking in the 86th percentile for low short pressure) confirms the bears have little structural grip on the name. Value remains the weakest pillar at 45.3, which at a forward P/E near 50x is hardly surprising for a franchise of this quality.

Insider activity this month is worth contextualising rather than reading as a signal. Co-founder and CTO Henry Samueli sold roughly 411,000 shares on September 4 at $372, and CFO Kirsten Krause has been selling smaller tranches regularly since July. All of these transactions were filed under pre-arranged 10b5-1 plans — scheduled sales set up in advance, not discretionary expressions of negative conviction. Samueli still holds nearly 48.8 million shares after the latest tranche. The institutional picture is similarly stable: BlackRock added 12.3 million shares in August and now holds 8.3% of the company, with Capital Research and FMR also adding through the summer.

The next scheduled event is the Q4 earnings release on December 10. Between now and then, the stock's trajectory will largely depend on whether the AI-development-slowdown narrative that has weighed on the broader semiconductor space continues to dominate, or whether Broadcom's custom accelerator design wins and enterprise networking exposure reassert themselves as differentiators — a tension the positioning data has so far refused to resolve in either direction.