Ingram Micro Holding Corporation heads into the back half of May carrying a 14% one-month loss, a sponsor still aggressively reducing its stake, and options traders who have swung from defensive hedging to near-pure call positioning — all at once.
The most important story is the overhang from Platinum Equity. On May 7, the private equity firm sold 14.47 million shares — a combined $361 million — at $24.96. That followed earlier sales in March totalling around $267 million. Platinum still holds roughly 197 million shares, or 85.5% of the company, so the supply pressure is structural. Each secondary offering resets the floor for where new buyers must anchor. The stock has responded accordingly, sliding from near $30 to $25.57 by May 19 — below the most recent offering price.
Options positioning has undergone a striking reversal. Heading into the April 30 earnings print, the put/call ratio peaked near 1.33, signalling meaningful demand for downside protection. After results — which beat on sales and EPS — that fear collapsed. The PCR now reads 0.076, one of the lowest levels of the past year and more than a full standard deviation below its 20-day average of 0.51. Call volume overwhelmingly dominates. That reads less like bullish conviction and more like a repricing event after the options-market hedges came off following the earnings beat. Borrow conditions reinforce the "nothing extreme here" message: cost to borrow is under 0.5%, down roughly 30% on the week. Availability is extremely loose at nearly 2,000% of short interest — meaning the lending pool is barely touched. Short interest itself is modest at 1.9% of the float, up 17% over the past month but in absolute terms still too small to tell a meaningful short squeeze story.
The Street is cautious but not bearish. Goldman Sachs maintained Neutral on April 23 while lifting its target from $25 to $30. JP Morgan, which holds an Underweight, nudged its target up slightly to $26 — still fractionally below where the stock traded this week. Truist Securities, initiating in March at Hold, raised its target to $29 in early May. RBC Capital, the most bullish of the active names, holds Outperform with a $33 target. The pattern is consistent: targets moving up after the Q1 beat, but ratings mostly anchored to the cautious end of the spectrum. The consensus is technically "buy" based on the five buy votes, but the bellwether names are not there. On valuation, the stock screens cheaply — PE near 7.5, EV/EBITDA around 5.2, and EV/EBIT in the 97th percentile of value. Forward EPS estimates have risen meaningfully year-on-year, ranking INGM in the 78th percentile on that measure. The bull case rests on Xvantage platform efficiency and a recovering IT spend backdrop; the bear case points to memory-driven cost inflation, PC refresh cycle uncertainty, and weaker free cash flow than the headline numbers suggest.
Institutional activity around the float is worth tracking separately from Platinum's sales. Capital Research added 670,000 shares through April, and Millennium Management bought nearly 770,000 shares in Q1 — both meaningful given the thin public float. Wellington, by contrast, cut its position by 1.4 million shares. The net institutional flow outside the sponsor looks constructive, but it amounts to picking up crumbs relative to the volume Platinum is draining out of the top.
Q1 results on April 30 beat estimates — sales came in at $13.96 billion against a $12.78 billion consensus, with adj. EPS of $0.75 ahead of the $0.73 estimate. The stock still fell 7.9% the next day and extended that to an 11.3% decline over five days. That reaction matters: an obvious beat failed to hold gains against the weight of the secondary offering announced simultaneously with results and the continued overhang of Platinum's position.
The next earnings date is July 30. Between now and then, what to watch is whether secondary offerings continue — Platinum's remaining 85% stake gives it ample runway — and whether the new Banzai International distribution alliance announced May 20 signals a push toward higher-margin channel partnerships that could shift the growth narrative.
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