SLB enters the week ahead of its October 23 earnings in a contradictory position: the stock has shed nearly 4% over the past week while bears have been quietly exiting and the Street keeps lifting its targets.
The most striking feature of SLB's positioning right now is how decisively shorts have pulled back. Short interest has fallen almost 10% over the past month, dropping to 3.45% of the free float — the lowest reading in the 30-day window. That retreat accelerated this week, with the weekly decline running at 7.5%. The borrow market corroborates the picture: cost to borrow is a negligible 0.57%, and availability is extraordinarily loose at 1,331% — meaning there are roughly 13 shares available to lend for every one currently borrowed. This is a market with almost no conviction on the short side. Options traders are leaning the same way. The put/call ratio has eased to 0.65, nearly a standard deviation below its 20-day average of 0.72, suggesting call demand has quietly picked up even as the stock drifted lower on the week. In a stock down 3.8% on the week, that divergence is worth noting.
The Street is firmly in the bull camp, and the most recent analyst action reinforces that view. UBS raised its target to $75 on September 14, the second consecutive upward revision from the same analyst within a week — the prior move took the target from $66 to $72 on September 9. The consensus mean sits at $62.34, implying roughly 20% upside from the current price of $52.12. Most post-earnings revisions from July pointed in the same direction: Barclays, Piper Sandler, TD Cowen, BMO Capital, Morgan Stanley, Evercore ISI, and Susquehanna all lifted targets after the Q2 print, which itself delivered a 9.1% single-day gain. The bull case rests on SLB's international revenue dominance and a credible digital growth story targeting doubled EBITDA by 2030. The bear case is more structural — Middle East disruption has already pressured guidance once this year, and the carbon transition creates long-horizon uncertainty that the current PE of around 17x does not fully price in. The EV/EBITDA of 9.6x has been broadly stable over the past month, ticking down slightly, which at least suggests valuation hasn't stretched further on the recent price softness.
The CEO sales are worth contextualising, not dismissing. Olivier Le Peuch sold $3.99 million worth of shares on a net basis over the past 90 days — a cluster of transactions in late August and early September at prices ranging from $52.55 to $60. All were executed under a pre-arranged 10b5-1 plan, which means they were scheduled in advance and carry limited signalling value about near-term conviction. The sales nonetheless happened at prices now sitting above the current market, which means the CEO realised better levels than where the stock trades today. Institutional positioning shows no obvious distress — BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street collectively hold more than 20% of shares, with State Street adding 2.5 million shares as recently as August.
The sector context is also broadly negative for the week. Close peer HAL dropped nearly 8% over the same five-day window, worse than SLB's 3.8% decline. NOV fell 3.8%, almost in lockstep. BKR was the outlier, gaining just under 1%. The sector-wide pressure looks driven by macro crude sentiment rather than company-specific news, which means SLB's relative resilience versus HAL is a modest positive — or at minimum, a sign that SLB's international and digital mix is providing some differentiation in a down week for the group.
The ORTEX short score has been drifting lower all week, reaching 38.8 by Tuesday from 41 ten days ago — a directional signal that short-side pressure is easing rather than building. With Q3 earnings scheduled for October 23, the setup heading into that print is: bears retreating, analysts constructive, options leaning toward calls, and a stock that jumped 9% on the last quarter's numbers. The key question heading into October is whether the Middle East disruption flagged in Q2 guidance proves transitory or whether it re-emerges as a headwind in the Q3 commentary.
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