The Macerich Company enters the first week of May with one of the more dramatic short-cover stories in the retail REIT space — shorts down a third in a month, options pivoting decisively bullish, and the stock quietly up 10% since early April.
The clearest signal in the data is the collapse in short positioning. Short Interest in MAC has fallen 33% over the past month, dropping to 3.3% of free float — roughly 8.4 million shares — from a peak above 13 million in mid-April. The retreat has been consistent and steep: shorts shed another 16% in the past week alone. Borrow conditions reinforce the picture. Cost to borrow is running just above 0.4%, a level that has barely moved in six weeks and signals no meaningful squeeze pressure. With availability at 878% of short interest, supply of lendable shares is vast — roughly nine shares available to borrow for every one actually borrowed.
Options positioning tells a complementary story. The put/call ratio has dropped to 0.80, well below its 20-day average of 0.90, and the z-score of -1.49 marks one of the more call-skewed readings in recent months. As recently as late March, the PCR was running above 1.30 — an extreme that coincided with the period when shorts were heaviest and the stock was near its lows. The shift from that defensive extreme to today's mildly bullish skew mirrors the broader short cover precisely.
The Street is not uniformly convinced, but the analyst trend has been moving in a single direction. Scotiabank upgraded to Sector Outperform at end of March, lifting its target from $19 to $22. Keybanc moved to Overweight in February with a $25 target. JPMorgan raised its target to $19 while keeping Underweight, and Goldman Sachs nudged its Sell-rated target to $17 — notable as bearish outliers when most of the recent action has been upgrades or target increases. The consensus target now clusters near $21.63, barely a rounding error from the current price of $21.50. That tight proximity suggests the Street has largely marked the stock up to fair value and is watching for catalysts to reopen the gap. Factor scores back up the cautious framing: EPS momentum readings rank in the bottom quartile on both 30-day (23rd percentile) and 90-day (2nd percentile) bases, and the EPS surprise score sits at the 1st percentile — the company has a recent track record of disappointing versus estimates.
One bright spot in the factor data is the forward EPS picture. The 12-month forward EPS year-over-year increase ranks in the 98th percentile, signalling that even if near-term beats have been scarce, the earnings trajectory is expected to improve materially. The dividend score ranks at the 88th percentile, though the dividend history in the data is stale — the last confirmed payment listed dates to mid-2022 — and investors should not rely on that score alone for income assumptions. The EV/EBITDA multiple of 19x has eased slightly over the past 30 days, consistent with the price rally compressing entry points for new longs.
Institutional ownership is concentrated and active. BlackRock has held its position near 17.5% of shares, adding around 1.1 million shares in the most recent filing period. JP Morgan Asset Management and CenterSquare Investment Management both added aggressively in the March quarter — JP Morgan's reported last-period addition of 3.6 million shares stands out as one of the larger incremental moves among the top-15 holders. Close retail REIT peers had a mixed week: AKR gained nearly 5% and FRT added 3.7%, while SKT and CBL both slipped. MAC's flat close on Tuesday and -1.1% weekly performance look defensive by comparison, suggesting the short cover has not yet translated into fresh long-side momentum.
The next earnings event is pencilled for June 1. The most recent quarterly result — February 2026 — produced a 1-day decline of 3.6% and a 5-day drawdown of 9.4%, a reaction worth tracking against how much repositioning the market has already done ahead of the next print.
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