Goldman Sachs lifted OXY to Buy on Thursday, setting a $69 price target. The move stands out because it arrives while short sellers have been adding exposure and the stock has slipped 6.4% over the past month.
Neil Mehta at Goldman Sachs upgraded Occidental Petroleum from Neutral to Buy, raising his price target from $63 to $69. At Wednesday's close of $55.32, the new target implies roughly 24.7% upside. The broader analyst community remains cautious: the consensus is Hold, with 9 buys against 15 hold ratings. The mean price target across the street sits at $68.24.
The Goldman move follows a run of target-price increases from other firms. UBS raised its target to $67 from $59 on September 14, while Wells Fargo lifted its Overweight target to $82 from $79 on the same date. Evercore ISI raised to $70 from $65 on September 11. None of those firms upgraded their ratings, making Goldman's conviction call the most decisive step in the recent analyst activity.
Benzinga's bull case centres on new CEO Richard Jackson's operational track record, a roughly 16 billion boe resource base, and a $4 billion sustainable cash flow improvement plan running through 2030. The bear case is straightforward: OXY carries no commodity hedges, so any sustained oil price weakness flows directly into cash generation.
Short interest in OXY climbed roughly 9% over the past week to 2.30% of the free float as of September 29. That is a low absolute level, and the lending market places no friction behind any new short positions. Borrow availability is essentially uncapped, with nearly 994 million shares available to lend as of September 29. The cost to borrow stands at 0.33%, down 22% over the past month.
The short score sits at 31.9, placing OXY firmly in low-short-pressure territory despite the recent week-on-week increase in shares short.
Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway remains the dominant holder at 26.5% of shares as of the last disclosure, with no change recorded in the most recent period. BlackRock added 3.2 million shares through August, State Street added 2.9 million, and Invesco added 5 million. On the sell side, The Vanguard Group's 13G filing from March shows a position that fell to zero from 8.53% previously, though Vanguard Capital Management filed a separate 13G in April disclosing a 5.51% stake. All positions are as last disclosed and subject to change.
CEO Richard Jackson made an open-market purchase of 4,770 shares at $52.38 in late June, the only conventional open-market buy in the recent insider record.
Next earnings are scheduled for November 11. The stock trades at a P/E of 12.1x and EV/EBITDA of 5.7x, both of which have drifted lower over the past 30 days alongside the price decline, giving the Goldman upgrade a value-inflection framing worth watching as oil prices evolve.
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