Insulet Corporation enters the post-earnings stretch with the Street's price targets dramatically lower — yet the direction of conviction remains firmly bullish.
The analyst response to May's results has been one of almost uniform target compression. BofA Securities cut its target from $288 to $208 while holding Buy. JP Morgan trimmed from $340 to $275, keeping Overweight. RBC Capital slashed from $325 to $280, maintaining Outperform — and reiterated that view again this week. BTIG moved its target down to $235 from $260 today, still at Buy. The outlier is Barclays, sitting at Underweight with a $198 target, the only firm explicitly negative on the name. The consensus mean sits at $244 — nearly 59% above the current price of $153.80. That gap is wide enough to flag: either the Street's conviction is justified by a genuine recovery path, or targets haven't fully caught up with the new reality. William Blair assumed coverage at Outperform this week, suggesting at least one fresh set of eyes sees value at these levels.
The positioning picture is notably relaxed for a stock that has fallen roughly 19% over the past month. Short interest is 4.1% of free float — essentially flat on the week, down about 7% over the past month. Shorts added a few hundred thousand shares in mid-May after earnings but have since given some back. Borrow availability is extremely loose: tens of millions of shares are available against under three million shorted, and cost to borrow has fallen to 0.37%, down more than 23% on the week. There is no evidence of a squeeze setup, and no evidence that short sellers are pressing the move lower aggressively. The ORTEX short score of 35 is mid-range, consistent with this reading.
Options positioning has shifted meaningfully since the pre-earnings note. The put/call ratio has dropped to 0.71, below its 20-day average of 0.78 and near the 52-week low of 0.62 hit earlier this month. That is the opposite of defensive — options traders are leaning toward calls, not puts, even after a painful month. The contrast with mid-April, when the PCR was running above 1.0, is sharp. Back then, investors were hedging. Now they appear to be positioning for a bounce.
The factor picture adds some nuance. EPS momentum ranks in the 76th percentile on a 30-day basis and the 71st over 90 days — the earnings trend, at least on a relative basis, is not deteriorating. EPS surprise history ranks at the 71st percentile, and the forward EPS growth score hits the 72nd. The analyst recommendation differential scores in the 92nd percentile, meaning the gap between current ratings and historical norms is unusually wide — consistent with a stock that has been punished hard while analyst ratings haven't moved with it. The days-to-cover rank is in the 87th percentile, reflecting a relatively short covering period. Valuation has re-rated lower: the P/E has compressed by nearly 5.7 points over 30 days to 21.6x, and the P/B has fallen by 1.2 points to 4.6x. Both are moving in the direction the bears would want.
The bull and bear cases are well-defined. Bulls point to Insulet's patch-pump leadership, a growing patient base, and international expansion optionality. Bears focus on GLP-1 adoption eroding the Type 2 addressable market and the risk that guidance resets are not yet finished. The previous earnings preview noted that the real question was whether management had set a guidance floor — the stock's muted +1.5% one-day reaction to the May 20 print suggests the answer was "maybe, but not convincingly." The next earnings date is August 6. That is the next moment the floor thesis gets tested.
Overall, positioning looks more hopeful than cautious: options traders are call-biased, short sellers are not pressing, and the Street is holding bullish ratings even after slashing targets. What to watch is whether the $244 consensus mean begins to compress further — or whether the stock starts to close the 59% gap to it — heading into the August print.
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