Chipotle stock has seen significant improvement since January
Shares of Chipotle Mexican Grill, Inc. (NYSE:CMG) are moving higher this morning, last seen up 1% at $676.43. Driving the price action is yet another analyst bull note for CMG, this time out of Wedbush, which upgraded the security to "neutral" from "underperform," and hiked its price target to $640 from $500. The firm said it no longer sees near-term and medium-term risk for same-store sales growth.
This marks the third bull note for Chipotle stock since Monday, joining a price-target raise to $725 from $661 at Piper Jaffray and to $770 from $670 at Argus. Overall, analyst outlook has been hesitant, with just over 42% of the 28 covering firms sporting "buy" or better ratings.
On the charts, Chipotle has significantly improved since last year's multiple food contamination woes. The security was last seen up 55% year-to-date, and as we predicted just last month, has made its way back to territory not seen since late 2015.
Digging deeper, Chipotle stock's Schaeffer's put/call open interest ratio (SOIR) comes in at 1.35, ranking in the lofty 88th percentile of its annual range. In other words, near-term options traders have rarely been more put-biased in the past year.
Lastly, short interest on CMG has pulled back 2.8% during the most recent reporting period. With the 2.42 million shares accounting for 9.5% of the stock's total available float, it would take short sellers a full week to cover their bearish bets.