BlackRock heads into the final days of May with its stock up 4% on the week and options traders rotating away from defensive positioning — an unusual combination for a $1,077 stock still sitting roughly 14% below the consensus price target.
The options story is the most interesting angle right now. The put/call ratio has dropped to 1.31, almost exactly two standard deviations below its 20-day average of 1.39 — the least defensive options posture of the past year. That's a meaningful shift. For most of the past month, BLK's PCR ran above 1.38, reflecting consistent demand for downside protection. The move lower suggests traders are either closing hedges into the rally or adding fresh call exposure as the stock reclaims ground. Either way, the skew has flipped from cautious to constructive in a short window.
Short interest tells a much quieter story. At 1.1% of the free float, there is nothing meaningful here — bears have been gently trimming, with the estimated short count down about 1.2% on the week and 8% from its late-April peak near 1.94 million shares. Borrowing costs are almost negligible at 0.26%, down a third over the past month, and availability is about as loose as it gets. This is not a stock under any short-side pressure. The lending market is an afterthought.
The Street has been broadly constructive since the Q1 results in April. Following that print, Goldman Sachs lifted its target from $1,181 to $1,313 while maintaining Buy, and Morgan Stanley moved to $1,393 from $1,368 (Overweight). The cluster of upgrades across UBS, Barclays, Evercore, and KBW all raised targets the same day. The outlier is JPMorgan, which cut its target sharply from $1,269 to $1,128 before the results — and remains at Neutral. At the consensus mean of $1,251, the implied upside from current levels is around 16%. The bull case rests on BlackRock's organic base fee growth running at 6-7%, above its own 2030 target, against $13.5 trillion in AUM. The bear case is cost creep: G&A expenses growing at 13% in 2025 and operating margin estimates being revised down to the mid-40s.
The insider picture is worth noting without overreading. CEO Larry Fink sold approximately $35.6 million across four tranches on April 28, while President Rob Kapito sold around $9.2 million on April 27. Both transactions were at prices in the $1,050–$1,057 range, below current levels. These look like planned disposals rather than signals of concern, and trade significance scores are modest at 3 out of 10. The 90-day net insider activity is actually a net sale of around $125 million, which is meaningful in absolute terms but unremarkable for a stock of this size and ownership structure.
On valuation, BLK trades at roughly 19.2x trailing earnings and 3.1x book. Neither multiple is stretched by historical standards for the world's largest asset manager, though the earnings yield percentile (factor rank of 31) suggests the market is already pricing in a healthy recovery in AUM-driven revenues. Forward EPS growth expectations are among the strongest in the universe — a 93rd-percentile ranking on 12-month forward EPS growth acceleration — which anchors the bull case neatly. Peer performance has been mixed: MS and GS both gained around 5% on the week, running ahead of BLK's 4%, while IVZ added just 1.1% and BX barely moved at 0.9%.
The next scheduled earnings event is July 17. Between now and then, the focus will be on whether AUM flows from May data confirm the organic growth trajectory, and whether the margin compression narrative gets any relief from cost management updates — two threads that will likely determine whether the gap to consensus targets narrows or widens.
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