Bank of America closes the week on a very different note from the last: up 3% to $52.20, reversing the month-long grind lower flagged in the prior note and narrowing — though not closing — the gap to analyst targets.
The rally is the headline, and it deserves context. Seven days ago the stock was trading at $50.70 after a bruising month-long slide. The 3% weekly gain puts BAC back in line with its large-cap banking peers — C added 3.6%, WFC gained 4.2%, and RF led the group at nearly 4.7%. JPM was the relative laggard at just under 2%. The sector-wide bid suggests macro relief rather than a BAC-specific catalyst, but the stock had lagged its peers so badly in the preceding weeks that a mean-reversion catch-up was always the more likely shape for a bounce.
The short-unwind story has accelerated further. Short interest is now 1.21% of free float — down 17% over the past month and continuing the trend highlighted in consecutive prior notes. Short sellers who were carrying positions at roughly 106 million shares in mid-April have trimmed that book to 88 million. The borrow market reflects nothing of alarm: cost to borrow remains negligible at 0.39%, and availability is essentially unconstrained, with shares available to borrow running more than 100 times the current short position. There is no squeeze pressure here. What the data shows instead is a steady, orderly exit by a relatively small and shrinking short base. The ORTEX short score of 30.1 places BAC in the lower third of the universe for short-side interest — this is not a crowded trade.
Options positioning is equally calm. The put/call ratio is 1.26, marginally below its 20-day average of 1.28. The z-score is a whisker negative at -0.36, meaning options traders are slightly less defensive than they have been recently — not a notable signal in either direction. The 52-week range for the PCR runs from 1.08 to 1.67, and the current reading is comfortably in the lower half of that range. No outsized hedging demand, no obvious directional bet building in the options market.
The Street remains constructively positioned, though the analyst data here is worth dating carefully. The cluster of price-target upgrades from mid-April — Jefferies to $65, KBW to $64, Oppenheimer and Evercore ISI each to $61 — all followed BAC's Q1 earnings print on April 15. Those moves came after JPMorgan trimmed its target to $57.50 during the early-April tariff panic. The net effect: consensus sits at $63.16, implying roughly 21% upside from current levels on a hold-skewed rating. The bull case rests on NII expansion — Q1 net interest income rose 9% year-over-year to $15.7 billion — and continued deposit growth. Bears point to the CET1 ratio slipping to 11.2% and the risk that a slowing economy erodes credit quality faster than NII growth can compensate. Valuation gives neither side a clear argument: the stock trades at 11.1x trailing earnings and 1.26x book — neither cheap enough to force the issue nor rich enough to justify aggression.
Insider activity adds a minor footnote worth noting. CEO Brian Moynihan sold 18,083 shares on May 15 at $49.77 as part of what appears to be a recurring award-and-sell programme — the same pattern was visible in April and March. Chief Risk Officer Geoffrey Greener sold a more substantial 126,756 shares on May 5 at $53.00, generating roughly $6.7 million. Neither sale is unusual in context, but both executives were selling into a stock that was then closer to its month lows. With Q2 earnings confirmed for July 14, the next meaningful datapoint is how the NII trajectory reads after another quarter of the current rate environment.
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