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Brookfield Infrastructure Corporation heads into today's earnings report with short sellers adding positions at a measured but accelerating pace, even as options markets appear less defensive than usual.
Short interest has climbed roughly 13% over the past month, reaching around 10.4 million shares. The weekly pace picked up sharply, with a jump of nearly 9% in the past week alone. Despite that build, the borrow market remains far from stressed. Availability is running at 177%, meaning there are nearly twice as many shares available to lend as are currently borrowed, well within the normal range and close to mid-October levels. Borrowing costs have risen 44% over the past week to just under 1%, but the absolute level remains low. The ORTEX short score has edged up to 67.5, a level that places BIPC in roughly the bottom decile of its universe on this measure, reflecting the recent directional drift in short positioning without signalling an extreme.
Options positioning has actually eased into the print. The put/call ratio has dropped to 0.97, almost one standard deviation below its 20-day average of 1.12. That makes the options market look more balanced than it has been over much of the past month, when the ratio was running above 1.30. The contrast with the short interest build is the clearest tension in the data: shorts are adding, but options traders have recently reduced their hedging activity.
The analyst picture heading into the print is dominated by a single voice. Morgan Stanley, which has rated BIPC Underweight since March, trimmed its price target yesterday from $50 to $48, keeping its negative stance intact. At $36.65, the stock trades at a sharp discount to the consensus mean target of $48, implying significant upside on paper. Morgan Stanley's direction runs counter to that gap. The stock is down roughly 1% on the week and has barely moved over the past month, though a recent note flagged that it has declined around 24% year-to-date. Correlated peers including CPK and NJR each rose 2% on the week, underscoring the relative underperformance.
The earnings history adds another layer to the setup. The four most recent prints produced moves of plus 1.8%, minus 1.9%, minus 2.2% and minus 0.4% on the day, with one notably larger five-day swing of minus 8.3%. The pattern is for modest initial moves that can extend in the days following the release.
The print will test whether BIPC's infrastructure cash flows justify the valuation implied by the consensus target, or whether Morgan Stanley's more cautious read on the stock's prospects is closer to where the market is heading.
See the live data behind this article on ORTEX.
Open BIPC on ORTEX →ORTEX Market Intelligence content is generated by AI from a snapshot of ORTEX's proprietary data and reviewed by the ORTEX team. Content is informational only and does not constitute investment advice.
