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Blackstone enters the final stretch before its October 16 earnings date with the stock finding a footing after last month's sharp sell-off, but options traders have not yet stood down.
The price has stabilised. BX closed at $113.36 on October 6, up 1.5% on the day, though still down fractionally on the week and off roughly 17% over the past month. That is a meaningful shift from the picture a week ago, when the stock was printing $114 and had shed 8% in a single week. The bleeding has slowed. Short sellers appear to have taken note: SI has dropped 5% over the past month to 2.5% of the free float, retreating from a peak near 2.9% in early September. That is a low absolute level with a clear downward trend, and it does not tell a bearish story. The borrow market confirms it: cost to borrow has ticked up 8% over the week to 0.39%, but that is still a trivially cheap rate, and availability is at 2,400%, meaning there are more than 20 shares available to lend for every one currently borrowed. Bears are not queuing up.
Options positioning is the more interesting signal, and it has shifted in a notable direction since the previous note. The put/call ratio has eased from 1.65 a week ago to 1.65 still, with the 20-day mean now at 1.61 and the z-score just 0.4 standard deviations above it. That is a meaningful change in framing: what looked like a directional drift higher in put demand has flattened out. The PCR remains above its August levels, when it was routinely below 1.40, but the accumulation of protective puts that built through September appears to have paused. The 52-week high on the ratio is 1.87, so current levels sit in the middle of the year's range rather than at an extreme.
The Street is divided but skews constructive. The analyst consensus mean target is $141.64, roughly 25% above the current price, though that aggregate includes a wide spread of views. Wells Fargo initiated coverage this week with an Equal-Weight rating and a $122 target, parking itself just above spot. Goldman Sachs holds a Neutral with a $127 target. The more bullish contingent, including Oppenheimer at $171 and RBC Capital at $169, points to Blackstone's $1.35 trillion AUM base and what they see as an improving realization pipeline into late 2026 and 2027. The bear case centres on the near-term fee drag: second-quarter management fees missed consensus, credit and real estate fees fell sequentially, and elevated BCRED redemptions have pressured the retail channel. Valuation has re-rated sharply over the past month: the P/E multiple has compressed by roughly 3.4 turns to 16x, and the P/B has fallen nearly 2 points to 9.5x, both reflecting the 17% price decline rather than a fundamental earnings revision. EPS surprise ranks in the 80th percentile, and the analyst recommendation divergence factor scores in the 91st, suggesting the Street remains more bullish on BX than on most of its coverage universe.
Insider activity leaned heavily toward selling through August and into September, though volumes were not extreme. Director Joseph Baratta sold just over 100,000 shares across two transactions on September 18 at prices between $123 and $124, none under a 10b5-1 plan. The Chief Legal Officer and Chief Accounting Officer both sold in August above $145. Net insider value over the 90 days to September 18 was negative $24.4 million. None of these trades were made under pre-arranged plans, which makes them more discretionary in character, though the significance scores on each filing were low. Director Ruth Porat added a small number of shares in August at around $137, a token position rather than a conviction statement.
On the peer front, the week's price action was broadly similar across the alternative asset manager group. KKR fell 2.7% over the week and CG dropped 2%, while TPG and STEP were the outliers to the upside, gaining 3.4% and 4.7% respectively. BX's marginal decline of 0.6% put it in the middle of the pack, a notable relative improvement given it had been the worst performer in the group a week earlier.
The October 16 print is nine days away, and the question the market will be answering then is whether the pressure on near-term fee generation visible in Q2 has stabilised, or whether BCRED redemptions and the lag before recently raised funds become fee-paying have continued to drag on revenue conversion into Q3.
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