WDC heads into the final week of May with one of the most lopsided setups in the storage sector: the stock has surged 15% in five sessions and 30% over the past month, yet a cluster of analyst upgrades is still scrambling to match a share price that has already moved past several of their revised targets.
The analyst story is the sharpest angle this week. Barclays lifted its target to $620 on May 27, keeping an Overweight rating, just as Evercore ISI raised to $575 the day before — both moving in response to a stock that has already blown through prior consensus. The broad direction is unambiguous: virtually every firm that has touched the name recently has raised its target, with bulls at Cantor Fitzgerald anchoring the high end at $660 and Citigroup and TD Cowen each lifting to $500 post-earnings. The mean target now runs near $518, which sits below the current price of $524.65 — a rare inversion that tells its own story about how quickly the rally has run ahead of the Street. UBS holds the lone Neutral, capping the upside argument among the major houses, but the weight of recent activity skews firmly bullish.
The bull case rests on pricing power and capacity-mix gains in hard-disk drives, where higher-capacity units are commanding better margins. The bear case focuses on the debt load, continued reliance on Asian manufacturing, and the structural question of whether SSD adoption in data centres will eventually compress HDD volumes. Western Digital's ePMR and HAMR technology roadmap is the key variable the bears watch most closely.
Short interest sits at 8.7% of free float — meaningful enough to attract attention — but the positioning story is notably calm given the scale of the price move. Short interest has crept up about 12% over the past month in share terms, adding roughly 3.2 million shares since late April. That looks more like incremental adds than a conviction short-rebuild; the move higher has not triggered aggressive covering. Borrowing costs remain rock-bottom at 0.47%, and availability has actually tightened this week to around 461% — still firmly in the comfortable zone, well above the 52-week low of 252%. There is no squeeze pressure here.
Options positioning reinforces the bullish momentum read. The put/call ratio dropped sharply to 1.31 on May 26, almost 2.8 standard deviations below its 20-day mean of 2.15. That is nearly the most one-sided call-heavy reading of the past year — options traders have rotated decisively away from downside protection and toward upside participation. The 52-week low on PCR is 0.54; the current print is rapidly approaching that territory, signalling that the options market has turned outright confident rather than cautious.
Insider activity introduces the one counterweight worth noting. On May 20 and 21, multiple senior executives — including the CEO, CFO, COO, Chief Legal Officer, and Chief Marketing Officer — sold shares at prices between $459 and $487. The CFO's sale of 18,374 shares for roughly $8.4 million was the largest single transaction. In aggregate, the 90-day net position is a modest positive at around 38,500 shares, suggesting these look more like routine plan-driven sales than directional signals. Still, the concentration of C-suite selling in a two-day window, while the stock was below its current level, is worth tracking in context of the subsequent surge.
The most recent earnings print on April 30 showed a 4.5% next-day gain and a 12.4% five-day gain — WDC has been rewarding buyers on results recently. The next event lands July 30. The question to watch between now and then is whether the analyst consensus catches up to the share price, or whether the current inversion — targets below spot — starts to weigh on incremental buyers who typically anchor to Street upside potential.
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