Target Corporation has given back the earnings-day bounce in the week since results, leaving the stock in an awkward spot: below the mean analyst target, but with no new catalyst to close the gap before June 10.
The price has slipped 1.4% on the week to $125.43, erasing much of the post-Q1 relief and pulling TGT back below the $131 mean target. That creates modest mechanical upside on paper — roughly 5% — but the analyst distribution tells a more complicated story. Post-earnings revisions clustered heavily in the days after May 20: Goldman Sachs raised its target to $127 while holding Neutral, RBC lifted to $153 with Outperform, DA Davidson moved to $155 on a Buy, and Telsey took Outperform to $150. The bulk of the Street, though, sits in the Neutral to Hold band — Truist, Piper Sandler, and Baird all raised targets while keeping non-Buy ratings. Goldman's $127 target, sitting almost exactly at current levels, captures the consensus mood: the print was good enough to lift the floor, not good enough to build a bull case. EPS momentum scores tell a friendlier story — the 30-day reading ranks in the 84th percentile and the 90-day at the 77th — but that's a backward-looking signal from a quarter that's now priced in.
Short positioning is not the driver here. At 3.5% of the free float, short interest has been on a steady downward path over the past month — down 15% from April highs — and ticked up just 1% on the week, which is noise rather than a signal. Borrowing costs have fallen sharply, down 29% on the week to a near-negligible 0.20%, and availability is extraordinarily loose at more than 5,000% of outstanding short interest. There is no squeeze setup and no meaningful new conviction from bears. The short score of 34.8 has been remarkably stable over the trailing two weeks, drifting down from a brief spike to 36.7 on May 13 — that spike coincided with an elevated short interest reading that has since fully unwound.
Options sentiment is similarly unremarkable. The put/call ratio of 0.82 is fractionally below its 20-day average of 0.84, with a z-score of -0.76 — neither cautious nor aggressive. PCR has been drifting lower since mid-May, when it briefly touched 0.88, suggesting a mild tilt toward calls that matches the post-earnings relief tone rather than any fresh defensive hedging. The 52-week PCR range runs from 0.60 to 0.98, so the current reading sits in comfortable mid-range territory. Broader sector peers also face pressure: WMT is the biggest drag, down 11% on the week, while COST fell 6.8%. TGT's 1.4% weekly decline looks comparatively resilient, but it's hard to read outperformance into it when the sector is broadly under pressure.
The institutional picture adds some texture. BlackRock added 3.1 million shares to reach 8.3% of shares outstanding — the largest disclosed change among top holders — and D.E. Shaw built a position of 7.9 million shares in the most recent quarter. The insider data is dated to early April, when the CFO and CEO both sold shares at $120.76 alongside routine equity award events. Nothing in that cluster reads as exceptional.
The next print is June 10, and the question for that release shifts from whether the Q1 bounce was real to whether the operational momentum — new CEO, comp-sales recovery, e-commerce progress — is durable enough to justify the targets that bulls have been raising since last week. With the stock trading in the narrow band between Goldman's floor and RBC's ceiling, that answer will determine whether the analyst distribution stays paralysed or finally resolves in one direction.
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