Ducommun comes out of its May 12 earnings print with the Street in an unusually constructive mood — and short sellers pressing harder at the same time.
The analyst response to the quarter has been swift and uniformly positive. B. Riley lifted its target from $155 to $187, keeping its Buy rating. RBC Capital raised its Outperform target to $155 from $150. Both moves landed on May 13, the day after the print. Goldman Sachs had already moved first in late April, bumping its Buy target from $134 to $151. The direction of travel across every covering firm has been upward for months. The consensus mean target now stands near $154, with the stock at $145.03 after a 3.1% day-on-day gain and a 1.7% advance on the week.
Short sellers are pushing back against that bullish consensus in a material way. Short interest has roughly doubled since early April — it was 2.4% of the free float on April 1 and has climbed steadily to just above 5.1% now, its highest level in the 30-day window captured here. The weekly jump alone is 12%. That pace of short-building, arriving precisely alongside earnings, is the clearest sign of a divergence in view: bulls are lifting targets, shorts are adding size. What keeps this from looking like a squeeze setup is the borrow market. Availability remains extremely loose — cost to borrow is only 0.49% annualised, barely above a rounding error, and has drifted lower over the past month even as short interest climbed. Shorts face no meaningful squeeze pressure from the lending side.
Options positioning adds a wrinkle. The put/call ratio jumped to 0.11 on May 12 — nearly three standard deviations above its 20-day average of 0.085, the highest defensive reading in weeks. At 0.11 the absolute level is still very low (the 52-week high is 0.68), so this is not a crowded hedging trade. But the z-score spike on earnings day is notable: it suggests some participants were buying downside protection ahead of the number, even if at modest scale. With the stock up on the day, those puts expired worthless — but the residual positioning may shift heading into the next week.
On the ownership side, the insider picture is consistent with stock-price strength rather than conviction selling. The CEO and CFO both sold on May 8 — a cluster of routine post-earnings sales at $137.23. Those transactions are small in aggregate and low in significance relative to larger sales executed in March, when the CFO sold over $1m of stock. The 90-day net insider figure is actually positive at roughly 126,000 shares net, reflecting a prior purchase cluster by CEO Stephen Oswald. BlackRock is the largest institutional holder at 11.2% of shares, and State Street added over 107,000 shares in the most recent reported period — a quiet endorsement from passive and semi-passive managers.
The valuation picture is not cheap. The trailing P/E runs at 31.9x and EV/EBITDA at 15.7x, both edging higher with the recent price move. Factor scores flag weak EPS momentum at the 30th percentile over both the 30- and 90-day window, which is worth watching as the Street absorbs the May 12 quarter and revises models. The short score is 40.4, middling in the universe — elevated enough to warrant attention, but not in the red-flag zone.
The next thing to watch is whether the gap between the B. Riley target of $187 and the current print around $145 draws fresh institutional buying, or whether the continued short-interest build — now comfortably above 5% of float — reflects a more specific thesis about the earnings quality or the trajectory of aerospace demand that the bulls aren't pricing in.
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