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XP Inc. heads into the week of October 5 with its stock up 15% over the past month, options traders firmly in the bullish camp, and the Street upgrading its view, yet short sellers are quietly adding to positions even as the borrow market remains almost comically uncrowded.
The clearest signal this week is in options. Positioning is as bullish as it gets for this name: the put/call ratio has dropped to 0.07, well below its 20-day average of 0.10 and close to the 52-week low of 0.037. Calls outnumber puts by roughly 14 to 1. That is not cautious hedging ahead of the November 17 earnings date. It reads as a market leaning hard into the recent momentum, with the stock now at $21.50 after a 5% gain on the week and 15% over the past month.
Short interest tells a more ambiguous story. At 4.5% of the free float, the short position is meaningful but not extreme. It has crept up about 3% over the past week after falling roughly 1% over the prior month, with the daily short share count climbing from around 18.2 million to 18.6 million between Monday and Friday. Borrow costs remain negligible at 0.51%, and availability is exceptionally loose, running at roughly 1,460% of current short interest, meaning there are around 135 million shares available to lend against an 18.6 million share short. The borrow market is not signalling any squeeze pressure whatsoever. The short score of 39.7 sits in the bottom half of the ORTEX universe, consistent with a stock where bears are present but not dominant.
The Street has moved in XP's favour, though targets remain grounded well below where recent notes have implied. Citigroup raised its target from $23 to $25 at end of September while keeping a Buy rating, the most recent action on the stock. Itau BBA upgraded from Market Perform to Outperform in August with a $22 target. The direction of travel is positive, and with the stock at $21.50, that $25 Citi target represents about 16% upside from current levels, a plausible rather than heroic ask. UBS has been active on the name through the year, trimming its target to $25 from $28 in June after earlier raising it. The consensus leans constructively toward Buy-equivalent ratings. On valuation, the trailing PE has drifted to about 9.5x, up about 0.6x over the past month as the stock has re-rated. Price to book is around 2.1x, also edging higher. XP's EPS surprise factor score ranks in the 97th percentile of the ORTEX universe, meaning it has beaten estimates consistently, while a dividend score of 95 reflects a yield running near 7.1% on current levels.
The ownership picture has a structural element worth tracking. Two 13D activists are on the register. XP Control LLC, the controlling shareholder, held 18.7% of the class as of its July 2026 filing, down from 19.6% previously. General Atlantic filed a 13D/A in December 2025 disclosing a 5.4% stake. Both are Schedule 13D filers, meaning they have disclosed activist-level intent. As is standard with these filings, stakes are as-last-disclosed around the 5% threshold, and positions can change without a new filing once below that level. BlackRock added just under 2.5 million shares in the quarter and now holds 9.7% of shares outstanding. ARGA Investment Management added nearly 4 million shares through June and Marshall Wace added 3.3 million, two meaningful active-money moves in the same period.
Retail attention has also picked up. The ORTEX Alt Data layer shows XP's Wikipedia attention score running at a z-score of 2.2 relative to its own 90-day history as of late September, the highest combined retail attention reading for the stock in that window. This is attention data, not a revenue indicator, but the spike aligns with the price and options momentum.
With the next earnings print due November 17, the setup to watch is whether the extreme call-side options skew and the recent Street upgrades survive contact with what has been a volatile Brazilian macro backdrop, and whether the controlling shareholder's continued trimming of its stake accelerates.
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