Tempus AI enters the final week of September with a striking combination: short sellers quietly reducing exposure, Goldman Sachs opening coverage at Neutral, and a stock that just logged a 12% weekly gain while the broader life-sciences peer group struggles for direction.
The short-side story has quietly shifted. Short interest has fallen roughly 13% over the past month, down to 16.6% of the free float — still elevated in absolute terms, but clearly moving in one direction. The retreat from the mid-August peak of around 33 million shares short is meaningful: that peak coincided with the stock trading at much lower levels, and the partial unwind has tracked the price recovery. Borrow availability has loosened materially alongside — running at 176% of short interest, well into the comfortable zone, compared to readings below 60% in mid-August when the squeeze pressure was at its most acute. Cost to borrow remains trivial at 0.53%, barely changed on the week, confirming this is not a stock where new shorts face any meaningful friction entering positions. Options traders are equally unbothered: the put/call ratio at 0.40 is almost exactly in line with its 20-day average, with a z-score near zero, placing it near the lower end of its 52-week range. Neither side is hedging aggressively into the near-term.
The Street has been notably active on TEM over the past three weeks, though the consensus message is cautious optimism rather than conviction. Goldman Sachs initiated with Neutral and a $75 target — in line with the current price — signalling the firm sees the setup as fairly valued at these levels. UBS also launched coverage at Neutral ($70). Three separate initiations in early September alone, from Roth Capital, Rothschild, and Cantor Fitzgerald, landed at targets ranging from $67 to $80. The outlier on the bullish side remains Piper Sandler, which upgraded to Overweight in early September and lifted its target to $76. HC Wainwright raised its Buy target to $66, now sitting below the market price, limiting its credibility as a directional call. The consensus mean target of around $68.56 is notable: the stock at $77.19 is trading roughly 11% above the average analyst target, a gap that rarely resolves without either a price pullback or a wave of upward revisions. Bulls point to the FDA clearance for Tempus ECG-PH, Merck and Moderna partnership optionality, and an EV/EBITDA that has compressed nearly 9 turns over the past 30 days. Bears flag the continued unprofitability — the P/E ratio is deeply negative — and heavy reliance on Medicare reimbursement coverage. The analyst recommendation differential factor scores in the 99th percentile, an unusually wide spread of opinion that reflects genuine disagreement about the company's path to profitability.
Insider activity is worth noting here, though context matters. CEO Eric Lefkofsky sold approximately $15.7 million worth of shares on September 17, across multiple transactions — a large number in dollar terms, but every single trade was executed under a pre-arranged 10b5-1 plan. The same applies to EVP Andrew Polovin and Chief Accounting Officer Ryan Bartolucci, who also sold under planned programmes the same day. Pre-planned sales are compensation-mechanics, not signals of conviction; Lefkofsky still holds over 40 million shares, representing roughly 22.7% of the company. The 90-day net insider selling figure of $41.8 million looks dramatic but is almost entirely explained by these scheduled disposals. ARK Investment Management, by contrast, added 415,000 shares in August, and Franklin Templeton increased its position by 771,000 shares in the same period — two active managers moving in the opposite direction to the 10b5-1 flow.
Earnings history reinforces the stock's tendency to react positively to results. The August 2026 print produced a 1.4% next-day move and a 20.9% five-day gain. The July 2026 report moved the stock 5.6% the day after, and nearly 11% across the following week. The next event lands October 30. With the ORTEX short score running at 67.7 — elevated, but drifting lower from a peak near 69.3 earlier this month — and the stock already running 12% higher on the week, the key question heading into that event is whether the gap between the current price and the analyst consensus target ($77 versus $68.56) compresses before or after the print.
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