DTM Short Position Near a Year-High Three Days Before the Print

DT Midstream, a natural gas gathering and pipeline operator, reports third-quarter results on October 29 with short sellers holding their largest position in at least a year and the stock trading roughly flat against a midstream peer group that has moved modestly higher.

Short interest has climbed steadily through October, reaching 6.5% of the free float as of October 22. That figure is up roughly 19% over the past month, driven by a persistent, week-on-week accumulation rather than a sudden spike. Previous notes in this series documented that shorts kept adding even as the stock sold off, and the position has not unwound materially since. The stock itself closed at $123.91 on Friday, a 0.4% gain on the day but barely positive on the week, while close peers WMB, KMI and OKE each gained between 0.6% and 2.7% over the same period.

The borrow market does not amplify the short thesis into a squeeze risk. Availability is 494%, meaning there are roughly five shares available to lend for every one currently borrowed, down from around 521% a week ago but still well inside easy-borrow territory. Cost to borrow has fallen 13% on the week to 0.40%, the cheapest it has been since early October. Shorts face no meaningful friction in maintaining or adding to the position. Options positioning has also settled: the put/call ratio of 0.12 is modestly above its 20-day average of 0.09 but less than one standard deviation away, well off the brief spike to 0.26 on October 19 that proved a single-session anomaly.

The analyst picture going into Wednesday's release is one of broadly maintained optimism with quietly trimmed targets. Morgan Stanley kept its Overweight rating this week but cut its price target from $170 to $164. That follows a similar pattern from Barclays and Jefferies over the prior six weeks, both maintaining their ratings while nudging targets lower. The mean target still implies roughly 22% upside to the current price, but the direction of revisions has been consistently downward since mid-July. Bears point to $3.3 billion of debt on the balance sheet, heavy customer concentration in Expand Energy, and asset concentration in the Haynesville and Northeast regions. The bull case rests on a $3.4 billion project backlog that has grown 50%, take-or-pay contract structures that underpin cash flow stability, and a dividend growth target of 5% to 7% annually that the company has framed as consistent with its EBITDA trajectory.

The print on Wednesday is less a test of whether fee-based revenues held up, the contract structure largely answers that, and more a question of whether management can articulate a path to backlog execution that justifies a valuation running at roughly 12.6 times EV/EBITDA while analyst targets continue to drift lower.