WMB closed the week at $76.12, up 4.2% over five sessions and 25.5% year-to-date, even as options traders signal the most bullish positioning seen in months.
The strongest current in Williams' setup is the breadth and consistency of analyst conviction. Goldman Sachs upgraded the stock to Buy on April 20 — a meaningful shift from a bellwether firm. Stifel followed just this week, raising its target to $83 while keeping its Buy. Across April, RBC, Jefferies, and Scotiabank all lifted targets, none dropped ratings. The mean price target now rests at $81.03, about 6% above the current price. That gap is tight for a name where the analyst consensus ranks in the 96th percentile of all stocks ORTEX covers — a reading that tells you the Street is unusually aligned, with very few dissenters. Bulls point to the Transco pipeline franchise and a growing backlog of power innovation projects. Bears worry about leverage creep as Williams leans into power generation, and flag regulatory risk on long-haul pipeline approvals. So far, the bulls are winning the argument at the institutional level: Vanguard, BlackRock, and State Street all added shares in their most recent reporting periods.
Options positioning reinforces the constructive tone. The put/call ratio has fallen to 0.56 — about one standard deviation below its 20-day average of 0.61 — with call demand clearly dominating. That's close to the lowest defensive positioning of the past year, where the 52-week PCR low is 0.48. Options traders are not hedging into earnings; they are leaning long.
Short positioning tells the same story, quietly. SI has climbed about 17% from early April levels in raw share terms, rising from roughly 1.2% to 1.45% of free float — a genuine build, but still far too low to generate meaningful squeeze dynamics or borrow tension. The cost to borrow is just 0.37% annualised, down 26% on the week and roughly 75% below where it was a month ago. Borrow availability remains loose. There is no evidence in the lending market that short sellers are anything other than marginal actors here.
The valuation picture is less one-directional. WMB trades at a P/E of 31.2 and a price-to-book of 6.8, with both multiples up modestly over the past month as the stock has rallied. EV/EBITDA at 14.5x has been essentially flat. The RSI at 66 is elevated but not extreme. The dividend yield sits at 2.85%, and the dividend score ranks in the 97th percentile — a standout figure that will matter to the income-oriented institutional base that anchors this name. EPS forward growth scores are more pedestrian: the 12-month forward EPS year-on-year increase ranks in just the 25th percentile, which is the one tangible data point bears can point to when questioning whether the current multiple is warranted.
Williams reports Q1 results on May 5, and the Q2 print is scheduled for July 30. The most recent post-earnings day move was modest at 0.77%. The next read on whether the Transco backlog and power projects translate into the earnings acceleration the analyst community is pricing in arrives in late July. Closest peers KMI and TRGP gained 1.6% and 4.6% respectively over the same week — broadly in line with WMB — while AM and EQT lagged, both finishing the week in the red. The midstream cohort is broadly moving together, which means any differentiation around WMB's specific execution on its power-linked growth story will need to come from the fundamentals, not from price action alone.
What to watch next: whether the short position continues to creep toward 2% of float even as the stock rallies, and whether that analyst consensus — unusually tight and bullish for a midstream name — holds through the July earnings release.
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