Blackstone Posts Earnings Bounce, But Options Defensiveness Lingers

Blackstone reported Q3 results on Thursday and the stock has responded: shares closed at $110.34 on Tuesday, up 3% on the day and recovering from levels that had briefly dipped below $107 in the immediate post-earnings session. The monthly picture remains bruising, down 12% from September highs, but the earnings print has at least arrested the freefall that had dominated the preceding three weeks of this note's coverage.

The options market has not fully relaxed. The put/call ratio dropped slightly from Monday's near-peak reading of 1.999 to 1.928, but that still places it more than two standard deviations above its 20-day average of 1.724, the highest sustained level of the past year. For context, the 52-week low on the ratio was 1.219. The concentration of protective put buying that characterized the pre-earnings setup has not unwound in the way one might expect after a positive day-one reaction. Borrow conditions, meanwhile, tell a very different story. Availability is extraordinarily loose at 2,795%, roughly 28 shares available to borrow for every one currently lent out. Cost to borrow is 0.38%, fractionally higher than mid-week but still close to the low end of its 30-day range. Short interest, at 2.8% of free float, eased about 2.8% over the week before ticking back to roughly unchanged on Tuesday. None of this signals a stock under meaningful short pressure.

The Street spent most of October trimming targets before the print. Piper Sandler cut to $125 from $130 on Monday, maintaining Neutral. UBS took its target to $116 from $122 a week earlier, also staying Neutral. TD Cowen, retaining its Buy rating, pulled back from $154 to $144. The direction of travel was consistent across conviction levels, bulls lowering their ceiling, neutrals lowering their floor. The consensus mean now stands at $138, against a current price of $110, a gap that captures genuine disagreement about the timing of Blackstone's earnings inflection rather than the direction of it. The bull case centres on $961.6 billion in fee-earning AUM and a wealth channel that recorded $324 billion in assets at June-end, with improving realization and redemption trends expected to lift fee-related earnings margins into 2027. The bear case focuses on a second consecutive quarter where management fees missed consensus, elevated BCRED retail redemptions, and newer drawdown funds that may not reach fee-paying status for one to two more quarters. Factor scores add some texture: the dividend score ranks in the 94th percentile and the analyst recommendation dispersion ranks 90th, both reflecting a stock where the long-term franchise view remains intact even as near-term estimates keep coming down.

Insider activity over the past 90 days has leaned firmly toward selling. Director Joseph Baratta sold just over 100,000 shares across two transactions on September 18 at prices between $123 and $124, collecting roughly $12.4 million in total. Chief Legal Officer John Finley sold approximately 45,000 shares on August 11 at prices near $147. Chief Administrative Officer Vikrant Sawhney sold 30,000 shares at around $135 in early August. There was a small purchase by director Ruth Porat in the same period, but at around $45,000 in total value it is not material against the selling volume. Net across 90 days, insiders disposed of roughly 184,000 shares worth $24.4 million. None of the sales were declared under a 10b5-1 pre-arranged plan, which makes the clustering notable. All of them occurred at prices well above where the stock now trades.

The Q3 print itself was the sixth from the earnings history worth noting. The last event on October 16 produced a 1-day move of minus 1.9%. Before that, the July 23 print delivered a 5.8% gain on day one and extended to 4.3% over the following five days. The asymmetry between those two outcomes is precisely what kept options defensive into this week's release. With the print now behind it and the stock trading at $110, the next question is whether the options market normalises toward its recent average or whether the put/call ratio stays elevated as investors gauge how quickly the earnings inflection the bulls have been expecting actually materialises.