Stories are generated from ORTEX data and reviewed by the ORTEX team. How we publish
Tenaris heads into its November 4 earnings with the stock quietly regaining ground, up nearly 3% on the week to €26.01, but the more telling story is how little conviction either bulls or bears are showing in the positioning data.
The borrow market offers almost no drama. Availability is extraordinarily loose, with roughly 2,570% of short interest still available in the lending pool, well above even the already-generous 52-week floor of 369%. Cost to borrow is running at just 0.71%, a fraction of what it would take to make shorting expensive, and that rate has barely moved over the past month. Short interest itself is negligible at this level of utilisation. This is a stock where the lending market is essentially frictionless: bears face no meaningful squeeze risk, and the absence of borrow pressure means the week's price gains are being driven by something other than short covering.
The factor picture is more interesting than the positioning. Tenaris ranks in the 81st percentile on short score, a low-short-interest quality signal, and the EPS momentum reading over the past 12 months forward puts it in the 80th percentile for expected earnings growth. The dividend score at the 99th percentile reflects a historically generous payout, though the most recent dividend history in the data runs only to early 2022, so that ranking likely reflects balance-sheet quality rather than an imminent yield event. Valuation is undemanding: the stock trades at a price-to-earnings multiple of around 13.8x, which has expanded by roughly 0.9 points over the past month as the share price has recovered, and EV/EBITDA is at 8.7x, easing slightly from a month ago. Neither multiple looks stretched for a cash-generative industrial exporter in a stable-to-rising energy environment.
Ownership is heavily concentrated. Rocca and Partners, the founding family vehicle, holds 68.3% of shares, leaving limited free float and helping explain why the lending pool shows such extreme availability relative to what is actually being borrowed. Among the remaining institutional holders, Wellington Management added nearly 1.9 million shares in the most recent reported period, the largest incremental addition among the named institutions. BlackRock and Goldman Sachs Asset Management also added modestly. Norges Bank trimmed by 1.3 million shares as of June, the most significant reduction in the top-holder list.
Earnings history gives some reason for caution on the reaction to the November 4 print. Each of the three most recent results dates produced a negative one-day move: down approximately 8.5%, 4.1% and 6.4% respectively. Whether driven by guidance, commodity price weakness or a mismatch between expectations and delivery, the stock has not rewarded holding into results on any of those occasions. The five-day move after the May quarter was mildly positive, but the August report left the stock lower on both a one-day and five-day basis.
Peers broadly matched or slightly lagged TEN's week. SPM on the Milan exchange added 6.5% over the same period, while TCW on the TSX gained 5.8%. HAL and NOV were roughly flat to marginally negative. The relative performance advantage for Tenaris and its Italian-listed peer suggests some rotation into European-listed energy services names this week.
With November 4 three weeks out, the setup to watch is whether the EPS momentum readings translate into an estimate revision cycle before the print, and whether the five-day moves after the next result finally break the recent pattern of post-earnings weakness.
See the live data behind this article on ORTEX.
Open TEN 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.
