HSY enters its Q1 2026 earnings release — due pre-market Thursday, April 30 — with short sellers at their most aggressive since mid-March and a Street that has spent the past two weeks trimming price targets across the board.
Short interest has climbed sharply over the past month. It now sits at 6.5% of the free float, up from roughly 4.8% at the start of April — a move of nearly 35% in under four weeks. The jump was sharpest around April 10, when reported short shares leapt from the low-7 millions to above 9 million in a single session, and positions have held that elevated level since. That said, the borrow market itself shows little stress: cost to borrow is a modest 0.44% APR, and availability remains ample, with the lending pool far from strained. Borrow is cheaper today than it was a month ago despite the surge in shorts. The setup describes a building directional bet rather than a squeeze-prone crowded trade.
Options positioning is broadly neutral heading into the print. The put/call ratio of 0.82 is barely above its 20-day average of 0.81 — a z-score of just 0.13, near the middle of its 52-week range. That's a notable contrast to the more defensive posture seen in early April, when the PCR was running close to 0.95. Options traders, in other words, are not actively hedging into this quarter's numbers the way they were during the broader market turbulence earlier in the month.
The analyst community has been almost uniformly trimming its view. Morgan Stanley lowered its target to $227 this week while keeping an Overweight rating — the most bullish recent action from a major firm, and still a step down. JP Morgan and Stifel both cut to the low $210s in the days prior, maintaining Neutral and Hold respectively. Barclays moved to $225 from $240 two weeks ago. The direction of travel is consistent: lower targets, unchanged ratings. The mean consensus target is $224.61, implying roughly 19% upside from the current $189.16. Bulls point to international expansion and the prospect of easing cocoa prices lifting margins. Bears cite US concentration risk, competition in packaged foods, and the uncertain demand overhang from GLP-1 adoption. The EV/EBITDA multiple has edged lower over 30 days to 13.8x, while the PE has compressed to 21.3x — both moving in the same direction as the targets. On factor scores, EPS momentum over 90 days ranks in the 94th percentile, and the dividend score is near the top of the universe at the 96th percentile. The short score is a middling 45.9, reflecting elevated but not extreme positioning.
The Milton Hershey School Trust — which controls roughly 28% of shares — has been a steady seller this week. The endowment filed multiple small-lot disposals on April 22, 23, and 24, totalling around 22,000 shares across nine separate transactions at prices between $187.97 and $192.45. These look like routine programmatic sales rather than a change in conviction: significance scores are low across all trades, and the Trust remains by a wide margin the dominant holder. Capital Research added 1.15 million shares in Q1, the largest institutional build among the top holders, while Vanguard and BlackRock made modest additions.
Hershey's two most recent earnings prints produced opposite outcomes. The February 5 release delivered a 12.5% one-day gain and held most of it over five days. The March 31 print reversed that, dropping 5% the next session and giving up a further 3% through the week. The stock has lost 11.5% in the past month against that choppy backdrop. Thursday's release arrives with shorts freshly built, targets freshly cut, and the stock trading nearly $36 below the Street consensus — making the distance between the market and analyst forecasts the clearest thing to watch when the numbers land.
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