Jefferies Lifts Target as GKOS Slides Into Earnings Season

Glaukos Corporation heads into its October 28 quarterly print with a notable disconnect: the Street just got more bullish, but the stock is down 7% on the week.

The freshest analyst move sharpens the contrast. Jefferies raised its price target to $210 from $190 on September 22 — the same day the stock closed at $159.86 — maintaining a Buy. That $50 gap between the new target and the current price implies roughly 31% upside in the eyes of one of the more recent and visible voices on the name. The broader consensus tells a similar story: the mean analyst target is $198.69, against a stock that has shed 13.5% over the past month. Most of the target-lifting happened after the July 29 earnings beat — Citigroup, Piper Sandler, Stifel, Truist, Wells Fargo, and Needham all raised targets in the days following that print, with Truist going to $215. The one dissenter in the pack is UBS, which kept its Neutral rating and lifted its target only to $172 — a level the stock has now already traded through on the way down. The picture is one of a broadly constructive Street being tested by a stubborn price retreat.

The bull case centres on iDose TR, the sustained-release travoprost implant that Glaukos developed as a differentiated play in glaucoma care. The bears are focused on a specific threat: pending LCD (local coverage determination) changes that could restrict iDose reimbursement, particularly its use in combination with other minimally invasive glaucoma surgery procedures. The bear estimate is a $30 million revenue headwind in calendar 2027, roughly a 10% drag on iDose sales. Epioxa, the company's keratoconus treatment, adds to the pipeline story but has been slow out of the gate — only a single physician has completed a single case, limiting near-term revenue contribution. Valuation multiples underline the growth-stock nature of the bet: the trailing P/E is around 556x and EV/EBITDA is roughly 231x, both compressing as the stock price has pulled back but still pricing in a significant ramp in earnings power. The EPS momentum score tells an interesting story here — 98th percentile over 30 days but 1st percentile over 90 days, suggesting recent estimate revisions are positive but the longer-term trend has been weak.

Short interest and borrow conditions are not driving the week's move. SI is a modest 6.8% of the free float, edged up 14% over the past month from around 3.4 million shares to 3.9 million — the build is real but not extreme. More importantly, the borrow market is wide open: availability is running at roughly 2,765%, meaning there are approximately 27 shares available to borrow for every one currently shorted. Cost to borrow is just 0.45%, down from the month's intraday high near 0.56%. Nothing in the lending market suggests short sellers are under any pressure, and the ORTEX short score of 45.8 — little changed over the past two weeks — reflects a settled rather than escalating short position. Options are similarly unexcited: the put/call ratio of 8.2 is modestly above its 20-day average of 7.4, less than half a standard deviation above the mean. This isn't a stock with charged options activity.

The July print is worth noting as context for October 28. The Q2 release on July 29 pushed the stock up 11.4% the next day, and it held most of those gains through the following week, closing the five-day window up 13%. That reaction — a strong beat with iDose momentum front and centre — is what drove the wave of analyst upgrades and set the stock on a path toward $185. The 13.5% reversal since then has given back that post-earnings pop almost entirely, bringing the stock back close to its pre-Q2 levels. The correction looks mechanical rather than fundamental, though the LCD overhang gives bears a credible fundamental peg.

The ownership register is large and institutional. BlackRock holds 16.2% as the dominant passive anchor, with Janus Henderson and two Vanguard entities each near 5-8%. Millennium and Holocene — both active managers — added materially in Q2, with Millennium building 407,000 shares and Holocene adding 131,000. The insider register carries a small signal worth noting: the Chief Development Officer sold $2.5 million in discretionary trades on August 28 outside any 10b5-1 plan, then followed with smaller plan-based sales in September. The discretionary nature of the August transaction lifts its significance relative to routine plan sales, though the CDO's profile is a step below CEO or CFO activity.

The October 28 print becomes a direct test of whether the iDose growth trajectory is durable enough to absorb the LCD headwind — and whether Epioxa can show any commercial traction beyond one completed case.