Coherent Corp. has done something unusual this week: it has traded clean through the ceiling of analyst consensus, leaving the Street scrambling to catch up and short sellers nursing losses on a position that was quietly rebuilding.
Tuesday's 17.6% single-session surge to $426.89 is the defining fact of this note. The stock has now gained 12% on the week and 30% over the past month — a move that is remarkable in isolation, but more remarkable for what it exposes. The mean analyst price target, last refreshed in mid-May, is $380.61. Coherent has not merely reached the bull-side targets; it has blown past the most aggressive among them. Rosenblatt had the highest published target at $425, set just after the May 6 earnings print. The stock closed above that level on Tuesday. Even Rothschild's $455 initiation target — the single most bullish number on the board — is now within touching distance. That is a meaningful reset: the stock has outrun the analyst playbook in a matter of weeks.
The positioning story is where the tension sits. Options traders have been tilting defensive through the move, not buying into it. The put/call ratio is running at 1.17, just above its 20-day average of 1.10, and while the z-score of 1.11 is not extreme, the direction is clear — protection demand has been building alongside the rally, not easing. The PCR touched its 52-week high of 1.20 on May 29, just before Tuesday's surge. That suggests a meaningful chunk of the options market was positioned for a pullback rather than a continuation. On the short side, the picture is more complicated: SI had been quietly rebuilding through late May, climbing 8.5% over the week to 5.37% of the free float. Bears who added into the rally are now underwater. The borrow market offers no squeeze threat — cost to borrow is just 0.42% and availability is cavernously wide at 3,828% — meaning there is no mechanical pressure forcing short covering. Any covering will be purely PnL-driven.
The Street picture has shifted dramatically since the notes published in April. The pattern from late April through early May was one of nearly unanimous target-lifting — Citi raised to $420, Stifel jumped from $275 to $412, TD Cowen moved from a fresh $330 initiation to $395, and Rosenblatt topped out at $425. The one outlier was Morgan Stanley, which maintained its Equal-Weight and raised only to $290 — a target the stock has now exceeded by nearly 50%. JP Morgan's Overweight with a $300 target, raised from $245 in April, looks equally stale. With the next earnings date not until August 14, neither firm will be forced to refresh quickly. Bulls point to vertically integrated manufacturing, expanding Indium Phosphide capacity, and improving gross margins. Bears flag the macro and tariff exposure in communications, and the industrial segment's early-stage competition risk. The EV/EBITDA has expanded to 44.7x, up more than 3 points over the past month — a re-rating that requires the margin expansion story to keep delivering.
The institutional register adds one interesting wrinkle. FMR (Fidelity) is the largest holder at 11.4% and added 559,844 shares as of April 30. BlackRock added 485,154 shares in the same period. State Street added 3 million shares. The direction of travel among the three largest passive-and-active holders is uniformly positive. Against that, the CFO sold 2,000 shares at $373 in mid-May — a small transaction, low significance, and well below the current price. Director Xia Howard has been a serial small seller since March. Neither move changes the institutional story, but the insider cadence is worth noting: the two most active sellers were both selling at prices that now look conservative.
The near-term comparison against peers is striking. GLW gained 13.4% on Tuesday alone, and FN was up 12.7% — suggesting the move was partly sector-wide rather than purely COHR-specific. LASR gained a more modest 8.2% on the day and is down 6.4% on the week, showing that not all photonics names were carried equally. What to watch next is whether the Street recalibrates its targets to reflect the new price reality — and whether the rebuilding short book, now caught above the tape, chooses to cover or add.
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