First Interstate BancSystem heads into the post-earnings stretch with short sellers rebuilding aggressively and the Street reading from two different scripts.
The short interest story is the week's dominant signal. SI jumped 18% in the past week, reaching 11.7% of free float — a meaningful step up from the roughly 10% range that held through most of March and early April. The move is concentrated in a single stretch: shorts were near 9.9% of float on April 22, then climbed steadily to 11.7% by April 30. That is a sharp directional commitment by bears, not noise. Days to cover is 7.24 according to the latest FINRA fortnightly data, meaning at current volumes it would take shorts well over a week to unwind. Yet the lending market does not flash a squeeze warning — cost to borrow is running at roughly 0.54%, barely above its recent range, and availability remains loose. The borrow is cheap and accessible, which means the short rebuild is deliberate positioning rather than a forced or panicked move.
Options positioning adds a separate layer of caution. The put/call ratio has jumped to 0.42 — more than two standard deviations above its 20-day mean of 0.24. Demand for puts relative to calls is near its highest level in recent months, though it remains far below the 52-week peak of 9.32, which points to an episodic spike rather than structural hedging. The combination of rising short interest and elevated PCR describes investors who are broadly more defensive on the name than they were a month ago.
The analyst response to the Q1 print is the clearest divergence. On May 1, Keefe, Bruyette & Woods downgraded FIBK to Market Perform from Outperform, cutting the target to $37 from $38 — a notable shift from a specialist regional bank firm. UBS, already on a Sell, lifted its target modestly to $33. DA Davidson, the bullish outlier, raised its target to $41 while holding a Buy. The result is a Street now split between bulls arguing the active buyback and interest income diversification can drive EPS growth, and bears flagging weaker-than-expected loan growth, rising nonperforming assets, and above-target expenses. The mean price target stands at $37.25, roughly 5% above the current $35.45, suggesting limited implied upside even from the friendlier analysts. P/E is running at 13.1x and price-to-book has ticked up to 1.01x, a modest re-rating over the past month but not extreme for the sector.
Institutional flows add one wrinkle worth noting. BlackRock added 6.2 million shares to reach a 14% stake, the largest add among top holders in the most recent filing period. State Street added 1.25 million shares. These are passive-manager moves and likely reflect index rebalancing, but the scale of BlackRock's build is substantial relative to the float. Against that, James Scott — disclosed as holding 4.7% — cut his position by 510,000 shares in late March. That reduction, alongside the cluster of small insider sales on March 16 from the CEO, CFO, CIO, COO and General Counsel at $33.22, marks a pattern of management trimming into a higher price — the stock has since moved up to $35.45.
The next scheduled earnings event is July 24. Between now and then, the metric to track is whether short interest holds above the 11% level or reverses — and whether the KBW downgrade triggers further analyst-side recalibration or stands as an isolated outlier in what remains a divided Street.
See the live data behind this article on ORTEX.
Open FIBK 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.
