Ryman Hospitality Properties is drawing a steady stream of bullish analyst revisions this week — and the shorts are voting with their feet in the same direction.
The standout this week is the pace of target-price upgrades. Morgan Stanley raised its target from $105 to $112 on May 12, maintaining Overweight. Cantor Fitzgerald followed the next morning, lifting to $124 from $115 while keeping its Overweight rating. Both moves came within 48 hours. JP Morgan also bumped its target to $113 on May 5. Wells Fargo raised to $114 at the end of April. The one dissenting voice was CBRE, which downgraded to Hold on May 5 — but that move has been swamped by the volume of positive revisions. The consensus price target runs around $118.93, representing roughly 10.6% upside to Tuesday's close of $107.50.
Short positioning adds further context to that constructive tilt. Shorts have retreated meaningfully — SI as a percent of free float has dropped from around 3.8% in mid-April to 2.8% now, a roughly 19% decline over the past month. The week-on-week fall is 6.1%, and the daily estimate fell again on May 12. That's a deliberate unwind, not noise. Borrow conditions confirm the lack of urgency among bears: cost to borrow has eased to 0.38% — down 13% on the week and nearly 20% over the past month — and availability is wide open with the lending pool barely engaged. The short score has ticked down to 35.9, consistent with low short-side conviction.
Options tell a different story, and it's worth flagging the contrast. The put/call ratio has dropped sharply to 2.01 from readings above 5.0 that dominated through most of April. That dramatic downshift looks less like a sudden surge of bullishness and more like a mechanical reset after a stretch of unusually heavy put accumulation — the 20-day mean PCR still runs at 4.4, well above current levels. The z-score is now −1.45, meaning the ratio is running more than a standard deviation below its recent average. The read: the extreme defensiveness seen in April has faded, but the options backdrop still carries a heavier-than-usual put skew by any longer-horizon standard.
Peer performance this week is mixed. HST gained 2.1% on the week, APLE added 1.6%, and SHO rose 2.2%. But PK fell 3.5% and XHR dropped 1.8%. RHP itself slipped 0.6% — underperforming the stronger names in the hotel REIT group but holding up better than the laggards. The stock has added 6.4% over the past month and is up nearly 15% year-to-date, which likely explains why some of the recent target-price increases are more catch-up than fresh conviction.
Factor scores are broadly supportive. The EPS surprise rank sits at the 70th percentile — the company has a consistent record of beating estimates. The dividend score ranks at the 79th percentile, and the 12-month forward yield is 4.55%. One mild flag: days-to-cover ranks in the 25th percentile, suggesting short positions are small enough that covering pressure would be limited even if sentiment shifted. The RSI14 at 61 points to a mildly overbought reading but nothing extreme.
The next scheduled earnings event is August 3. Between now and then, what to watch is whether the string of target increases from the Street translates into renewed buying interest, or whether the stock's 15% YTD run begins to weigh on valuation against the backdrop of that PCR still sitting structurally elevated.
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