OXY heads into the final days of May with a rare tension: the Street just turned more bullish, yet the stock keeps falling.
The analyst move is the headline story this week. Barclays upgraded OXY to Overweight from Equal-Weight on Tuesday, lifting its target from $59 to $72 — a sharp pivot from a previously neutral stance. Mizuho followed the next morning, raising its target to $75 while maintaining Outperform. Morgan Stanley lifted its target to $74 last Friday. The direction of travel is unmistakably constructive. Against a mean price target of $65.33 and a current price of $57.46, the Street is pricing in roughly 14% upside even after the recent slide. The exception is Truist, which holds a $57 target with a Hold rating — effectively telling clients the stock is already at fair value.
The price action tells a harder story. OXY fell 2.3% on Tuesday alone and is down 5.3% on the week to $57.46. The stock is flat on the month, meaning all of April's modest recovery has been given back in days. Peers confirm this is a sector-wide sell-off rather than an OXY-specific problem — MTDR dropped 11.6% on the week, APA fell 6.6%, lost 7.8%, and even the larger gave up 6.4%. OXY is actually holding up slightly better than some of its closest correlated names on this particular tape.
Positioning, however, shows no sign of panic or crowding. Short interest climbed roughly 11.5% over the past month to 3.1% of the free float — noticeable but far from extreme. The ORTEX short score is a modest 32.6, having edged higher over the past two weeks but well below any level that would signal a squeeze setup. Borrow conditions are correspondingly loose: the cost to borrow is just 0.47%, and availability is enormous at nearly 4,860% of short interest, down sharply from over 9,000% earlier in May but still indicating abundant lending supply. The borrow market carries no urgency.
Options tell a slightly more cautious story without being alarming. The put/call ratio is running at 0.55, about 1.6 standard deviations above its 20-day average of 0.50. That marks a clear drift toward protection relative to the recent norm, though it remains far below the 52-week high of 1.06. The shift has been gradual — the PCR was sitting near the annual low of 0.44 at end of April before spending all of May creeping higher. Investors are incrementally adding downside coverage, not rushing for the exits.
The fundamental backdrop adds another wrinkle. OXY scores in the 96th percentile for EPS surprise and the 95th for 90-day EPS momentum — the company has been consistently beating estimates. Yet the forward growth picture is deteriorating: the 12-month forward EPS growth percentile ranks just 23rd, and the factor note from earlier this week flagged a sharp reversal from strong forward growth to negative territory. On valuation, the P/E has compressed to 12.3x with EV/EBITDA near 5.7x — inexpensive multiples, and both have contracted over the past 30 days. The Berkshire Hathaway overhang remains a permanent fixture of the ownership story; Warren Buffett's firm holds 26.6% of shares with no change reported at the last 13F, an anchor position that helps cap downside volatility perceptions without directly driving near-term price action.
The next scheduled catalyst is the Q2 results on August 6. Given that the last earnings print triggered a 9.1% one-day decline, and the print before that a 3.8% drop, the question into summer is whether the upgraded analyst targets will attract fresh institutional buying — or whether the sector's crude-price sensitivity keeps the stock rangebound until the next earnings release narrows the gap between the $57 price and the $65–$75 target cluster.
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