Novo Nordisk heads into its May 6 Q1 results on the back of a sharp recovery — and with the Street still broadly skeptical about what comes next.
The stock has climbed 20% over the past month to $43.88, clawing back a large portion of the losses that followed a brutal February print, when the company dropped 13.8% in a single session after Q4 results disappointed. That move cast a long shadow. The five-day reaction was also negative at -3.1%, and the most recent March event produced only a marginal recovery of under 1% on the day. The pattern tells a story of a market that remains quick to punish and slow to reward. The bounce into this print is therefore notable — it comes before any fundamental confirmation.
Short sellers are not the driver of this rally. Short interest has collapsed by 34% over the past month, from roughly 28.5 million shares in late March to 16.6 million now, as bears covered aggressively into the move higher. Borrow conditions confirm the picture: cost to borrow is just 0.53%, down from a brief spike to 27% on March 30 that proved short-lived. Availability is extremely loose at current utilization levels — under 2%, far below the 57% peak hit just six weeks ago. The ORTEX short score of 27 places NVO in the 94th percentile for being shorted among pharma peers. This is not a squeeze story; it's a fundamental one.
The analyst community arrived at this print already having trimmed its expectations. Goldman Sachs downgraded the stock to Neutral in early March, cutting its target sharply. JPMorgan moved to Neutral in late February. Both moves came in the wake of the weak Q4 print and reflect a shared concern: that Wegovy and Ozempic revenue in North America is running below what the market had priced in. Bears point to Wegovy's Q1 2025 North American revenue tracking well short of consensus, and argue the incretin franchise's growth rate is decelerating faster than bulls assumed. The bull counter-argument centres on Novo's commanding 20% share of the branded diabetes market, the depth of physician and patient brand recognition for its GLP-1 drugs, and the scale of the obesity treatment opportunity still ahead. With the stock re-rated upward by 20% in a month, the P/E has expanded to roughly 12x — modest in absolute terms, but meaningfully higher than where it traded in the weeks following the February shock.
Options traders are not showing strong conviction either way. The put/call ratio of 0.69 is essentially flat against its 20-day average of 0.69, with a z-score near zero. There is no sign of unusual hedging demand or speculative call buying building into the number — positioning looks broadly neutral, neither crowded to the upside nor defensively skewed. The 12-month forward dividend yield of 4.1% provides a floor for income-oriented holders, ranking in the 98th percentile of the universe and likely anchoring some of the institutional base through volatility. Vanguard added over 6 million shares in Q1, while Norges Bank trimmed by 8.4 million — a gentle divergence in conviction at the institutional level.
Wednesday's print is less about validating the GLP-1 opportunity itself and more about whether Wegovy's North American trajectory is tracking back toward the consensus numbers that Goldman and JPM abandoned in the spring.
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