Deere & Company hit $703 this week — up nearly 9% over the past month — and the Street is scrambling to keep pace with a stock that has already left most of its analyst targets behind.
The analyst story is the most interesting thing happening here right now. Following the August Q3 beat, the upgrade cycle has been swift. Evercore ISI's David Raso moved to Outperform on September 3, lifting his target from $632 to $813 — one of the more aggressive repositionings in the coverage. Baird followed a day earlier, upgrading from Neutral to Outperform with an $800 target. Raymond James raised its target to $730 while holding its Outperform rating. The consensus sits at Buy, with 11 buy-rated analysts and a mean target of $688 — now already below the current price. That gap matters: with DE trading at $703 and the Street average implying a small downside, the next leg of the bull case rests on further target revisions rather than mean reversion. The analyst rec differentiation factor score ranks at the 99th percentile — a signal that the bullish tilt across the coverage is exceptionally uniform right now.
The bull case centres on the August results. Small Agriculture & Turf sales jumped 24% year-over-year to $2.17 billion, and the Construction & Forestry segment posted a 34% revenue increase with its earthmoving order book up 50% from the prior quarter. Bears point to a different set of numbers: Equipment Operations operating margin fell 180 basis points to 5.9%, dragged by tariff costs, and operating cash flow from Equipment Operations came in negative at $1.34 billion. The PE multiple has moved to 32.8x, up roughly 1.75 turns over the past month as the stock has re-rated higher. EV/EBITDA is running near 28.9x. These are not cheap levels for a cyclical industrial, and the margin compression narrative gives skeptics a foothold even as the top line recovers.
Short positioning is a non-story at these levels. Short interest is just 2% of the free float — low by any measure — and availability is exceptionally loose at around 2,004%, meaning there are roughly 20 shares available to borrow for every one currently lent out. Cost to borrow is 0.43%, down about 10% on the week. The ORTEX short score of 36 places DE in the bottom half of ranked stocks for short-side interest. Options positioning is similarly relaxed: the put/call ratio of 1.05 sits essentially in line with its 20-day average of 1.04, with a z-score near zero. Neither the options market nor the lending market is signalling any unusual positioning pressure.
The institutional register is worth noting, if only for the Capital Research and Management Company position. The fund added 3.9 million shares through August — the largest absolute addition among the top holders — bringing its stake to 6.79% of shares. Wellington Management also added meaningfully, increasing by 1.4 million shares. BlackRock and State Street made smaller additions. Cascade Investment (the Gates family vehicle) held flat at 7.3%, remaining the largest reported holder. Vanguard's 13G disclosure from April flagged a 7.04% stake, though a separate amended 13G/A showed a zeroed position — the disclosure note applies here: these are event-driven filings around the 5% threshold and may not reflect current levels precisely.
The August earnings print produced an 11.5% single-day move and a further 7.2% gain over the following week — the most recent quarter was clearly a positive catalyst. The next event is scheduled for November 25. Between now and then, the story will be whether the Street continues to revise targets above the current price level or whether the stock stalls as the upgrade cycle exhausts itself with consensus already in buy territory at every firm except Citi and JPMorgan, both of whom hold Neutral ratings with targets of $650 and $585 respectively — well below where DE is trading today.
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