RXO, Inc. enters its Q1 earnings print on Tuesday May 12 from a very different position than it occupied six weeks ago — up 40% over the past month and carrying a wave of freshly raised price targets that still lag the stock's current level.
The catalyst for that re-rating was last week's quarterly release on May 7. The stock jumped nearly 11% on the day. That reaction set the tone for Friday's analyst flurry. Seven firms raised their targets in a single session — UBS to $22, Wells Fargo to $22, Citigroup to $24, Truist to $26, Barclays to $20, and Morgan Stanley to $22. The consensus mean has moved to $21.19, but with RXO closing at $21.75 on Friday, the average target is already behind the tape. Crucially, Morgan Stanley downgraded from Overweight to Equal-Weight even while raising its target — a signal that one bellwether firm sees the rally as having done the work. Susquehanna, the lone bear on the panel, raised to $18 but kept a Negative rating. The overall picture is a Street that is bullishly tilted but operationally cautious: most raises came with unchanged ratings, not upgrades.
The bull case centres on margin recovery and network scale. The Coyote integration is widening carrier access. Segment gross margin reached 21.0%, up 40 basis points year-over-year. Final Mile stop growth hit 24% YoY. Bears point to the top line — revenue of $1.067 billion missed estimates, truckload volumes fell 8% YoY, and management guided for further low-to-mid single-digit volume declines in Q2. The earnings yield factor sits at 49th percentile, and with EV/EBITDA at 30.8x and a PE near 173x, the stock is priced for a recovery that has yet to fully arrive in the income statement.
Short positioning tells a moderately cautious but not extreme story. Short interest runs at roughly 10.8% of the free float — well above the data-snapshot figure based on a recalculated float — and has been drifting lower over the past month, down around 10% from the April highs near 15 million shares. Borrow is essentially free at 0.41% cost, and availability is loose, meaning there is no squeeze dynamic at work. The ORTEX short score holds at 65, a level it has maintained with little movement over the past two weeks. That's a meaningful but stable short book, not one that's pressing aggressively.
Options positioning is worth watching after Friday's close. The put/call ratio ticked up to 2.11 on May 8 — still broadly in line with the 20-day mean of 2.21 and only fractionally below it — after running in a tight band around 1.68-1.72 for most of the week. The z-score is effectively flat at -0.08, so there's no statistical skew in either direction heading into Tuesday's call. The 52-week PCR range is extraordinary, spanning 1.34 to 16.53, with those spike readings concentrated during the April tariff-shock period when puts overwhelmed calls. The current reading is calm by comparison.
Institutional ownership is concentrated: Orbis (21%), MFN Partners (17%), and BlackRock (14.5%) together hold more than half the float. That concentration can amplify moves in either direction when the narrative shifts — as it clearly did through April. Insider activity has been modest. CEO Drew Wilkerson received a stock award on May 1 and sold 40,370 shares at $19.59 the same day — a routine tax-withholding pattern that carries no directional signal. The net insider activity over 90 days is nominally positive in share terms but entirely driven by award grants.
With peers broadly softer on the week — JBHT down 1.3%, ARCB down 3.9%, and ULH sharply lower at -41.8% — RXO's 11% weekly gain stands out. The real test on Tuesday May 12 is whether Q2 guidance can validate the multiple expansion, or whether the volume headwinds management flagged — particularly in automotive truckload — prove more persistent than the stock's move implies.
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