Medtronic has now fallen to $87.09, down a further 4.1% on the week, widening the gap between where the stock trades and where analysts think it belongs.
The last note, published September 23, flagged the disconnect between a drifting stock and a Street that had just raised targets en masse after the September 1 earnings print. That gap has grown since. The mean analyst target remains $104.83. At $87.09, that implies more than 20% upside from current levels. TD Cowen reiterated its Buy and $110 target on September 30, the most recent action on the stock. Nothing in the analyst register has moved in the other direction. The consensus remains Buy, with 16 buy-rated analysts against a handful of neutral-leaning holds. The bear case is unchanged: slowing organic growth, pricing pressure in developed markets, and foreign-exchange exposure. But the bulls are pointing to raised guidance after Q1 and a pipeline of new product launches across cardiac rhythm and neuromodulation. The Street's argument is essentially that the market is pricing in the bear case too aggressively.
Positioning in the lending market gives little comfort to the short thesis. Availability is extremely loose, running at roughly 9,000% of short interest, meaning shares to borrow vastly outnumber shares already borrowed. Short interest is only 1.4% of the free float, low in absolute terms, though it has risen 40% over the past week from around 12.7 million shares to 17.8 million. That weekly jump is worth noting, but it arrives from a low base and the absolute level remains well below anything that would constitute meaningful short pressure. Borrowing costs, after spiking erratically mid-week to as high as 8.5% on September 23 and 5.8% on September 25, have since collapsed back to 0.83%, consistent with a normal, uncrowded borrow market. The cost-to-borrow spike looks like a transient technical event rather than a structural shift. Options positioning is only mildly more defensive than usual. The put/call ratio is at 0.62, just above its 20-day average of 0.59 and less than half a standard deviation above the mean. With the 52-week high at 0.74, options traders are not yet pricing in meaningful tail risk. The overall borrow and options picture is cautious at the margin but not alarmed.
The one genuinely unusual data point this week comes from retail attention. Wikipedia page views for Medtronic are running at a z-score of 2.45 against the company's own 90-day history, the highest retail attention reading in the recent dataset. That is a sentiment and awareness signal rather than a fundamental one. None of the alt data datasets tracked, which include FDA medical device filings, clinical trials, and SEC buyback disclosures, has been measured to lead Medtronic's reported figures, so no forward-looking read on the next print is available. The buyback data does carry one notable fact: the remaining buyback authorization reached its smallest Q2 level on record in the April 2025 quarter at $2.1 billion, down 60% year-on-year. That is now stale as a current data point but speaks to a capital allocation backdrop that has tightened relative to prior years.
Institutional ownership tells a steady rather than dramatic story. BlackRock holds roughly 9% and added 838,000 shares through August. Vanguard entities collectively hold around 10%. Capital Research trimmed 2.9 million shares as of June 30, and Managed Account Advisors cut nearly 3.5 million shares over the same period, the two largest recent reductions in the register. Insider activity is not a meaningful signal here. The only open-market transaction in the recent record is a small $139,000 sale by the EVP of Cardiovascular on September 16. The remaining filings are grants and tax-withholding transactions, compensation mechanics rather than conviction.
Valuation multiples have compressed alongside the price move. The PE has drifted down to 13.8 over the past 30 days, and price-to-book has eased to 2.1. The EV/EBITDA sits at 11.7, also down slightly over 30 days. The factor scorecard is mixed: the dividend score ranks at the 90th percentile, short score rank at the 75th, and forward EPS growth in the 74th, while EPS momentum at both 30 and 90 days sits in the mid-40s, reflecting the Street's caution about near-term earnings trajectory rather than any structural breakdown.
With the next earnings date set for November 24, the question for the weeks ahead is whether the stock can find support at current levels or whether the growing gap between price and analyst targets continues to widen without a near-term catalyst to close it.
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