BPOP heads into its October 23 Q3 results with the stock down 8% over the past month, insiders having sold heavily over the summer, and the two most recent analyst actions both pointing lower on price targets, even as buy-equivalent ratings hold.
The insider picture is the most pointed signal in this snapshot. The CEO, Javier Ferrer, sold 35,000 shares on August 10 at roughly $175 for just over $6.1 million. That followed a director sale of more than 6,400 shares across two tranches on July 30, and an Executive VP who sold 8,500 shares at $176 on August 4. None of these were filed under pre-arranged 10b5-1 trading plans, making them discretionary sales rather than scheduled liquidations. The 90-day net across all insiders is negative 53,561 shares, with net proceeds of approximately $9.4 million. Transaction codes F (tax withholding) account for some of the activity, including the CEO's August 31 filing, which is compensation mechanics rather than a conviction sale. But the open-market sells from August 4 and 10 are a different category. The stock has pulled back meaningfully since those transactions, closing at $156.30.
The analyst community has followed a similar arc. After a cluster of target upgrades immediately after the Q2 report on July 24, when firms including Barclays, KBW, Piper Sandler and Truist all raised targets into the $190 to $207 range, the mood has since cooled. Wells Fargo trimmed its target this week to $195 from $200, maintaining Overweight. Citigroup cut to $192 from $200 last week, keeping its Buy rating. The consensus target remains at $196.70, implying roughly 26% upside from current levels, but the direction of the most recent moves is downward. Benchmark is the outlier, having raised to $216 in late August, but that is now nearly a month old. The broad Street message is: still bullish on the name, but less so than a month ago.
Valuation multiples frame the pullback in context. BPOP trades at roughly 9.3 times trailing earnings, a figure that has drifted lower over the past 30 days, and 1.4 times book, which has also compressed modestly. For a regional bank with a strong deposit franchise and what the FDIC call report data shows were record Q2 totals for both assets ($78.4 billion) and deposits ($70.7 billion), the multiple is not demanding. The dividend score ranks in the 99th percentile of the universe, though the most recent dividend data in the snapshot is stale and pre-dates 2023, so current yield figures are not usable here. The 90-day EPS surprise factor ranks in the 85th percentile, and the 90-day EPS momentum score ranks in the 87th percentile, both reflecting the beat-and-raise trajectory that the July print continued.
Short interest is not the story here. At 2.6% of the free float, with borrow costs near 0.4% and availability vastly in excess of outstanding short positions, there is no structural pressure from the lending market. Short interest edged up about 4.6% over the past week but remains below its month-ago level. The ORTEX short score of 34.3 sits in the middle of its recent range, with no meaningful directional shift over the past two weeks. Options positioning has if anything tilted bullish: the put/call ratio is running well below its 20-day average at 0.27, roughly 1.4 standard deviations light on downside hedging relative to recent norms. The borrow market is loose by any measure, availability is multiples of the outstanding short interest.
One secondary data point worth noting is the Wikipedia retail attention signal, which registered a z-score of 4.7 against BPOP's own prior 90-day history as of late September. That is an attention reading, not a revenue indicator, but it suggests more retail eyes on the stock than usual in recent weeks, possibly tracking the pullback from the summer highs.
The FDIC call report data, published quarterly by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and covering Popular's insured bank charters, showed record Q2 total assets and deposits. The lead status for this dataset is untested, meaning ORTEX has not yet measured whether it leads Popular's reported earnings figures, so the record readings are best treated as balance-sheet colour rather than a signal for the October print.
With Q3 results due October 23, the question is whether the stock finds a floor ahead of the release or whether the pattern of insider selling near $175 and subsequent price weakness shapes how positioning looks going into the report.
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