PBF Energy heads into this week with a paradox at its core: the stock is up 15% over the past month and short sellers are quietly exiting — yet its most prominent shareholder has been selling aggressively throughout the rally.
The insider story is too large to ignore. Carlos Slim's vehicle, Control Empresarial de Capitales, dumped roughly 785,000 shares between April 28 and May 5 at prices between $41 and $46, generating approximately $34.9 million in proceeds. That follows a prior reduction of 985,000 shares last reported on May 5, leaving Slim still the largest holder at 15.6% of shares. The concentrated selling at the top of a 15% monthly move is what makes the pattern notable — not panic, but deliberate exit velocity from the single biggest name on the register.
The short-selling picture, by contrast, is actually unwinding. Short interest has dropped 12% over the past month to 9.8% of the free float, roughly 11.4 million shares, after peaking near 15.3 million shares in early April. The borrow market reflects no distress: cost to borrow is minimal at 0.52% annualised, and availability has loosened dramatically — shares available to lend now run at more than 37 times current short interest. There is plenty of inventory for new shorts if sentiment turns, but no evidence of a squeeze building. Options positioning has shifted a little more cautious in the last two sessions, with the put/call ratio jumping to 0.60 from below 0.33 for most of the prior fortnight, running 1.7 standard deviations above its 20-day average. That's a meaningful pivot — though the absolute level is still modest compared to readings above 0.75 seen during the April sell-off.
The macro backdrop is a genuine tailwind. A high-impact story published Wednesday pointed to US refiners benefiting from Strait of Hormuz disruption, which historically tightens crack spreads in favour of domestic operators. PBF's Q1 results (reported April 30) showed a refining rebound after losses, and throughput guidance was raised. EPS momentum scores are exceptional — the 30-day rank is 84th percentile, the 90-day rank 99th — signalling analysts have been upgrading forecasts at an accelerating pace. That's the bull case in a sentence: macro tightness plus operational recovery plus rising estimates.
The Street, however, is almost uniformly neutral-to-bearish in its ratings even as targets have moved up sharply. Citigroup raised its target from $36 to $43 on May 1, maintaining Neutral. Morgan Stanley bumped to $34 from $27 in late April, holding Underweight. TD Cowen — one of the few outright Sell-rated houses — trimmed from $41 to $36, while BMO sits at $50 with a Market Perform. The mean target of around $43 is barely above the current price of $42.76, which leaves almost no implied upside in consensus. The stock trades on a forward P/E near 7x and EV/EBITDA below 4x — cheap by any absolute standard — but refining multiples historically compress fast when crack spreads peak, and the quality factor score is a drag: the F-Score is near zero, and profitability metrics on ROA and ROCE are negative on a trailing basis.
The institutional flow adds a final layer of nuance. BlackRock added 704,000 shares as of April 30. State Street and Dimensional also added. But Goldman Sachs trimmed over 1.2 million shares in Q1, and Two Sigma built a new 1.8 million-share position — quant interest picking up as the momentum trade runs. The ORTEX short score has edged down to 48.8 from a spike above 54 on May 14, consistent with the cover-and-retreat pattern in short positions over the past fortnight.
What to watch: the Strait of Hormuz situation and its effect on crack spreads will be the dominant variable for refiner sentiment over the coming weeks, while Slim's remaining 15.6% stake means any renewed selling programme — or its absence — will remain a closely tracked signal for how PBF's largest insider reads the stock's near-term ceiling.
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