Radian Group heads into its Q1 earnings call — scheduled for May 7 — with the most bullish analyst signal in months sitting alongside a cluster of insider selling and options traders firmly in call-buying mode.
The single most notable move of the week came from the analyst desk. BofA Securities upgraded Radian from Underperform all the way to Buy on April 29, lifting its price target from $35 to $43. That is a dramatic reversal: BofA had been one of the few bears on the stock and now joins Keefe, Bruyette & Woods, which carries an Outperform rating with a matching $43 target. The mean target across the three covering analysts is $40.67, roughly 14% above the current price of $35.58. KBW had separately nudged its own target up from $42 to $43 in April, reinforcing the directional shift. Barclays remains the outlier, sitting at Equal-Weight with a $37 target — barely above spot. The consensus is formally a Buy, but with only two outright bulls and one sceptic, this is a thin bench.
Options positioning reflects the bullish tilt rather than caution. The put/call ratio fell to 0.19 on May 5, nearly 1.8 standard deviations below its 20-day average of 0.22. That is close to the 52-week low of 0.12 — a reading consistent with heavy call demand rather than any meaningful hedging. The borrow market tells a similar story: availability is extremely loose, with utilisation running well below 1% of the lending pool, near the floor of the past year. Cost to borrow at 0.50% APR is essentially free. There is no short-squeeze pressure here, and no meaningful effort to build new short positions.
Short interest confirms the picture. At 3.4% of the free float, positions have fallen roughly 31% over the past month — the bulk of that reduction happened in mid-April, when estimated short shares dropped from around 6.6 million to 4.1 million in a single session around April 10. The ORTEX short score of 35 places Radian in the lower half of the universe on short pressure. Bears are not building; they have been covering.
The insider tape is worth noting, though it doesn't change the overall read. General Counsel Edward Hoffman sold shares on three separate occasions in April — April 10, 17, and 23 — totalling roughly 30,000 shares at prices ranging from $35 to $36. A further 15,000-share sale appeared on April 29, the same day as the BofA upgrade. In aggregate, insiders sold approximately $1.6 million net over the past 90 days. The significance scores on each trade are low (rated 2 out of 10 by ORTEX), and the pattern looks more like scheduled or programmatic selling than a directional signal. Still, the Counsel selling into the BofA upgrade is a small note of caution.
From a valuation standpoint, Radian trades at 7.0x trailing earnings and 0.87x book — modest multiples for a mortgage insurer delivering double-digit return on equity. The EV/EBIT factor ranks in the 82nd percentile, suggesting the market is not pricing in much growth premium. The dividend score ranks in the 94th percentile, though the dividend history in the data shows no payouts since mid-2022, so that score likely reflects other yield-related characteristics rather than an active payout. The bear case centres on declining PMIERs cushion, falling reserve releases, and the vulnerability of mortgage origination volumes to higher rates. The bull case rests on the buyback commitment — management flagged $200 million in Q2 repurchases — and continued book value growth.
Among the closest peers, MTG and NMIH both fell roughly 8–9% on the week, and ESNT dropped around 5–6%. Radian's 0.9% weekly decline looks notably more contained. Whether that resilience continues into the May 7 print — and whether management's commentary on credit trends and origination volumes matches the upgraded expectations — is the next question for the market.
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