Boeing has spent the better part of five years giving investors heart palpitations — between the 737 MAX crashes, an auditor that quit, a door plug that blew off mid-flight, and a machinist strike that shut down production. But here in March 2026, something interesting is happening: Wall Street is starting to believe the turnaround is real.
Tigress Financial just raised its price target on Boeing to $290, maintaining a Buy rating. The stock currently trades around $195. That’s nearly 50% upside if they’re right. And while one analyst’s price target doesn’t make a thesis, the underlying numbers are starting to tell a different story than the headlines.
Start with the backlog: $682 billion. That’s not a typo. Boeing’s commercial airplane division alone accounts for over $560 billion of unfilled orders. Airlines around the world need planes, Airbus is capacity-constrained, and Boeing is effectively the only other game in town for large commercial aircraft. The backlog represents years of guaranteed revenue — the challenge is converting it into actual deliveries without another quality disaster.
Fiscal 2025 showed real progress. Revenue hit $89.5 billion, the highest since 2018. The company posted its first GAAP net profit in years at $6.27 billion (though a one-time $9.6 billion gain from selling its Digital Aviation Solutions unit skewed that number). More importantly, free cash flow turned narrowly positive at $0.4 billion after years of burning billions. The Boeing Global Services division — maintenance, parts, logistics — continues to be a cash machine with 18% margins.
CEO Kelly Ortberg, the former Rockwell Collins chief who took over in August 2024, has been making all the right noises. He relocated headquarters back to Seattle to be closer to the factory floor. He completed the $4.7 billion re-acquisition of Spirit AeroSystems, reversing a disastrous 2005 decision to outsource fuselage production. And he’s pushing 737 MAX production toward 53 aircraft per month by year-end, up from 42 currently.
But the elephant in the room is debt: $54.1 billion, with an $8 billion balloon payment due later this year. That limits Boeing’s ability to invest in new aircraft programs. The 777X, its flagship next-gen widebody, has already taken a $4.9 billion charge and won’t enter service until late 2027 at the earliest. And regulators — burned by the MAX disasters — aren’t cutting Boeing any slack on certification timelines.
Here’s the bull case in a sentence: Boeing is an irreplaceable duopoly player with a $682 billion backlog, improving execution, and a stock that’s still 21% below where it traded five years ago. The bear case is equally simple: $54 billion in debt, an unforgiving regulatory environment, and a track record that makes “trust but verify” feel generous. For traders with a 12-18 month horizon and a stomach for volatility, Boeing at $195 might be one of the more interesting risk-reward setups in the market right now.
