Lockheed Martin closed at $521 this week — up a modest 2.4% — but the stock is still nursing a 15% loss over the past month, and the gap between where it trades and what the Street thinks it's worth has rarely looked this wide.
The most telling tension right now is the options market. Investors have turned unusually bullish on calls relative to recent history: the put/call ratio has dropped to 0.58, more than 1.3 standard deviations below its 20-day average of 0.70. That's close to the cheapest put protection has looked all year — the 52-week low on PCR is 0.46, meaning today's reading is in the lower quarter of the range. The shift is a sharp reversal from April, when the PCR climbed above 0.84 in the days around the earnings print. Options traders appear to be reducing hedges rather than adding them, even as the stock remains well below its February highs.
Short interest tells a quieter story. At just under 1% of the free float, there is no meaningful short overhang here. What's notable is the direction: short interest fell roughly 8.6% over the past week, continuing a trend that has now seen it drop nearly 19% over the past month. Borrowing costs are a negligible 0.41%, and availability in the lending market is ample — there is no squeeze setup, no borrow scarcity, and the ORTEX short score of 28.4 places the stock firmly in non-crowded territory. Short sellers were most active in early April when shares touched their lows; they've been retreating since.
The Street's collective view is cautiously constructive but has clearly been trimmed. The mean analyst price target is $637.60, implying roughly 22% upside from current levels — a gap that reflects the severity of the post-earnings sell-off rather than any sudden enthusiasm. After Q1 results on April 23 sent the stock down 7.6% in a single session and another 6.7% over the following five days, several analysts cut targets while leaving ratings unchanged. Morgan Stanley trimmed to $653 from $675 maintaining Equal-Weight; RBC took its target down more sharply to $575 from $650. The dominant analyst stance is neutral-to-hold, with upside targets clustered in the $630-$700 range. The bear case remains the same as it has been all year: the Q2 2025 program losses that hammered segment margins — particularly Aeronautics, which saw a dramatic drop to negative operating income — have made execution the central question, not demand. The bull case rests on Missiles and Fire Control, where revenue grew more than 10% year-on-year, and a Space segment that continues to hold up. On valuation, the stock trades at a P/E near 17x and EV/EBITDA of roughly 12x, multiples that have compressed with the price decline over the past month.
The next scheduled earnings event is July 21. After the Q1 reaction — one of the sharpest single-day moves the stock has seen in recent memory — investors will be watching closely whether margin recovery in Aeronautics and any update to the $6 billion free cash flow guidance can reset expectations. Peer performance this week adds some texture: RTX gained 3.5% over the same period, LHX added 2.3%, and DRS was the standout, up nearly 8% on the week — suggesting the sector rotation is broadly intact even as LMT struggles to reclaim lost ground. The question into July is whether the operational narrative has genuinely turned, or whether the targets on the Street are still being walked lower.
See the live data behind this article on ORTEX.
Open LMT on ORTEX →ORTEX Market Intelligence content is generated by AI from a snapshot of ORTEX's proprietary data. Content is informational only and does not constitute investment advice.
