NOV heads into its Q1 2026 earnings call on April 28 with short sellers meaningfully more aggressive than they were a month ago — yet options traders are telling a completely different story.
The short interest picture demands attention. Bearish positioning has climbed 54% over the past month to 7.7% of the float, with the move accelerating sharply from mid-April onward. Days to cover run at 5.8, giving the short base some weight. Yet the lending market shows no stress: cost to borrow has eased to just 0.47%, down roughly 13% over the month, and utilization at 9.5% is less than half its 52-week peak of 21.3%. Short sellers are building positions into the print, but borrow is plentiful and there is no meaningful squeeze pressure in the lending market.
Options positioning flatly contradicts that bearish lean. The put/call ratio has collapsed to 0.084 — two standard deviations below its 20-day average of 0.095 — near the lowest reading of the past year. That is an unusually call-heavy posture for a stock heading into earnings, suggesting a cohort of investors is positioning for upside rather than hedging against a miss. The stock has already bounced 8.8% on the week and 1.6% on the day prior to the print, trading at $20.82, so some of that call activity may reflect momentum chasing rather than fundamental conviction.
The analyst community reflects genuine disagreement about the trajectory ahead. On the bull side, Stifel lifted its target to $23 last week while maintaining its Buy — the most constructive recent move. Morgan Stanley also nudged its target higher, to $20, though kept an Equal-Weight. RBC Capital went the other way, cutting to Sector Perform from Outperform on April 14 while leaving its $21 target intact. Goldman Sachs remains a Sell with a $20 target. The mean target barely clears current levels at $20.65, leaving little implied upside in consensus. The bull case centres on a $4.56 billion backlog — up 6.5% sequentially — improving EBITDA margins and strong offshore equipment demand. Bears point to a 21.5% year-over-year EBITDA decline and forward guidance that flagged revenue down 8–10%, driven by softer global drilling activity.
The earnings report will therefore test whether NOV's backlog strength and margin recovery narrative can hold against the drilling-activity headwinds that have kept the majority of analysts on the sidelines — and whether a stock that has already bounced hard into the print carries enough fundamental support to justify the move.
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