ADSK reports Q1 FY27 results tomorrow, May 28, with the Street broadly bullish but quietly recalibrating its expectations downward — a gap that makes the print more consequential than the calm surface suggests.
The analyst setup going in is the most telling signal. Morgan Stanley's Keith Weiss cut his target from $350 to $315 on May 26 while holding his Overweight rating — a bellwether move that landed less than 24 hours before the print. Keybanc followed a similar script a week earlier, trimming from $365 to $341. Barclays and BofA also lowered targets, though BofA simultaneously reinstated a Buy rating with a $300 target after previously sitting at Neutral. The net result is a consensus mean price target near $323 against a current price of $238 — implying roughly 36% upside — but the direction of travel for individual targets is clearly lower. Citigroup's April downgrade to Neutral at $246 stands out as the most bearish institutional read, though that call already sits near current trading levels.
The bull case centres on subscription momentum. Autodesk's recent billings beat of 10% and revenue acceleration to 14% growth have reinforced confidence in FY27 guidance of 9–10% underlying revenue growth. Bears point to go-to-market friction around the new transaction model, geographic softness in the UK and Canada, and a valuation profile that remains stretched — price-to-book above 10x and EV/EBITDA near 14.5x. The stock's forward EPS growth rank is in the 96th percentile of the universe, which supports the growth premium, but the EV/EBIT percentile rank of just 30 signals the market is already pricing in a lot of execution.
Short interest and lending conditions add no meaningful pressure to the picture. Short interest is running at 2.6% of free float — up roughly 5% over the past week but down 8% from a month ago — a modest, directionless reading. Borrow availability is essentially unconstrained, with over 200 million shares available to borrow. The cost to borrow has crept higher, from around 0.28% in mid-May to 0.60% now, but that remains far too low to suggest any squeeze dynamics. Options positioning has actually eased relative to recent history — the put/call ratio is at 1.39, about 1.4 standard deviations below its 20-day average of 1.44, a subtle shift toward less defensive positioning into the print rather than more. The stock itself has drifted 2.4% lower on the week but is roughly flat on the month.
Past earnings reactions at Autodesk have been decisively positive: the February 2026 print produced a 9.4% gain the day after and extended to 17.5% over the following five days, while the November 2025 result gained nearly 4% on day one and 7% over five days. The earnings report tomorrow is therefore less a test of whether Autodesk can grow and more a question of whether management's transaction-model transition is tracking well enough to justify a 36% gap between where the stock trades and where even trimmed analyst targets cluster.
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