Eli Lilly heads into its May 4 Q1 report with the stock surging back toward a consensus that still sees meaningful upside from current levels.
The standout heading into the print is the price action. Lilly jumped almost 10% on April 30 alone, closing at $934.60. That single-session move recovered most of a rough month and left the stock roughly 5% higher over the past four weeks. The rally is notable precisely because it arrived just days before the earnings release, compressing the gap to the analyst mean price target of $1,197 — still around 28% above Wednesday's close.
Options positioning reinforces the more constructive tone. The put/call ratio has fallen to 1.04, well below its 20-day average of 1.14 and roughly 1.6 standard deviations on the bullish side of that mean. Earlier in April, when the stock was under heavier pressure, the PCR was running above 1.28. The rotation away from protective puts into the current level tells a story of investors growing less defensive as the stock recovered — a meaningful shift heading into a catalyst.
Short interest is a sideshow here. At less than 1% of the free float, there is no material short position to speak of. Borrow costs remain negligible at 0.37%, and availability in the lending market is extremely loose, with no sign of squeeze dynamics. The week-on-week rise in short shares — up roughly 17% — sounds dramatic but still leaves absolute positioning trivially small for a stock of Lilly's scale.
The analyst debate is lopsided toward the bulls, but not uniformly. Morgan Stanley raised its target to $1,327 in April while maintaining Overweight. BofA and Guggenheim also lifted targets recently, keeping Buy ratings intact. The lone dissent of note came from HSBC in mid-March, which downgraded to Reduce with an $850 target — well below where the stock closed on Wednesday. The bull case centres on Lilly's GLP-1 franchise and double-digit growth ambitions across cardiometabolic and neuroscience. Bears point to R&D execution risk, supply chain exposure, and the stock's sensitivity to pipeline readouts. Factor scores tilt toward the bull camp: EPS momentum ranks in the 72nd percentile over 90 days, and the dividend score sits in the 94th percentile.
Institutional holders broadly added shares in Q1. Vanguard, BlackRock, Capital Research, State Street, Fidelity and T. Rowe Price all increased positions through March 31. JP Morgan Asset Management added the most aggressively, lifting its stake by nearly 2.7 million shares. The Lilly Endowment — the largest holder at just over 10% — trimmed slightly but remains the dominant anchor. Insider activity from February was routine award-and-sell housekeeping, carrying no directional signal worth reading into.
The May 4 print will test whether Lilly's Q1 revenue and GLP-1 volume numbers can substantiate a stock that, even after a sharp rally, trades at a significant discount to where the Street's most bullish voices have pencilled in fair value.
See the live data behind this article on ORTEX.
Open LLY on ORTEX →ORTEX Market Intelligence content is generated by AI from a snapshot of ORTEX's proprietary data. Content is informational only and does not constitute investment advice.
