Hershey Heads Into Q3 With Analysts Trimming Targets

HSY reports Q3 results on October 29 with the Street broadly sceptical and short sellers edging back into the stock.

Short interest has climbed to nearly 6% of the free float, up about 1.5% on the week to roughly 8.8 million shares. That is a meaningful position but not an extreme one. The lending market tells the same story: availability is generous at 862%, meaning there are nearly nine shares available to borrow for every one already out on loan, and cost to borrow sits at just 0.45%. There is no squeeze pressure here, just a steady drift higher in bearish positioning. Options are moving in the opposite direction. The put/call ratio has dropped to 0.75, nearly 1.5 standard deviations below its 20-day average, suggesting options traders are more willing to own upside exposure than they have been in recent weeks. The stock itself closed at $169.64 after falling 3.4% on Friday, though it is roughly flat on the month.

The analyst community has been voting with its price-target pen. Barclays trimmed its target to $178 from $200 on October 16. JP Morgan followed days later, cutting to $183 from $193. Both kept neutral-to-equal-weight ratings. TD Cowen, the lone buy-rated name in the recent batch, also reduced its target, to $198 from $210. Wells Fargo went further, cutting to $170 from $190 in early October, barely above where the stock is now trading. The mean target across the consensus sits at $197, implying roughly 16% upside, but the trajectory of recent revisions is uniformly downward. The bull case rests on Hershey's commanding share of the domestic confectionery market, 4Q25 net sales growth of 10.6%, and a portfolio that now extends into salty snacks. Bears point to a deteriorating competitive position in core chocolate: the company has shed an estimated 245 basis points of volume share year-to-date as Mars pushes value-oriented large packs, and new product launches are retaining shoppers at only low-to-mid single-digit rates. The widening price gap versus Mars is the central concern, as it limits how much pricing power Hershey can exercise without further share loss.

One ownership detail worth noting: the Milton Hershey School Trust, the company's dominant 27% shareholder, has been selling under a pre-arranged 10b5-1 plan through October, offloading shares on each of the last several trading days. These are scheduled, plan-governed sales rather than discretionary moves, so the signal value is limited. Still, net insider sales over the past 90 days total roughly $23 million. Meanwhile, GQG Partners built a new position of 2.8 million shares as of June 30, a notable entry that provides some counterbalance.

Wikipedia traffic for Hershey is running well above its own recent history, with a z-score of 2.3 as of October 23, though this reflects retail attention rather than any fundamental signal.

The October 29 print will test whether Hershey's sequential sales momentum is enough to offset the volume share erosion in chocolate, and whether management can credibly narrow the price gap with Mars without further margin sacrifice.