Top 5 Upgrades:
- Oppenheimer analyst Leland Gershell upgraded BioMarin to Outperform from Perform with a price target of $110, up from $92. Entering 2023, the market's increasing recognition of BioMarin's improving fundamentals and greater comfort around its near- and potentially long-term revenue opportunities "will translate into more pronounced outperformance," Gershell told investors in a research note.
- Barclays analyst Carter Gould upgraded Gilead Sciences to Equal Weight from Underweight with a price target of $76, up from $60, post third quarter results. The analyst believes the company's strong commercial execution justifies higher estimates.
- JPMorgan analyst Rajat Gupta upgraded TrueCar to Overweight from Underweight without a price target. The combination of recovering new vehicle inventory/supply should provide some cyclical support with the stock's valuation "not demanding" while the company's liquidity risks are limited, Gupta argued.
- Morgan Stanley analyst Meta Marshall upgraded Pure Storage to Overweight from Equal Weight with a price target of $37, up from $35. Risks around NAND pricing and cloud capex "do exist," admits Marshall, but she believes Pure Storage should fare better than general enterprise names in an environment of macro weakness, given share gains and its growing value proposition.
- Barclays analyst Raimo Lenschow upgraded Ceridian to Equal Weight from Underweight with a price target of $64, up from $54. The analyst argued that the COVID-19 pandemic has raised the profile of the human capital management space and made it more resilient in the current macro environment.
Top 5 Downgrades:
- Northland analyst Gus Richard downgraded AMD to Market Perform from Outperform with a price target of $60, down from $80. He thinks demand indigenousness to China will be "very slow to recover," while ARM CPU market share gains will continue, particularly in China, Richard told investors.
- BofA analyst Ken Hoexter downgraded TuSimple to Underperform from Buy with a price target of $5.50, down from $14, after the autonomous truck company terminated its CEO and co-founder Xiaodi Hou and removed him as Chairman following an audit committee investigation. RBC Capital analyst Joseph Spak also downgraded TuSimple to Underperform from Sector Perform with a price target of $4, down from $7.
- Truist analyst Bill Chappell downgraded Keurig Dr Pepper to Sell from Hold with a price target of $30, down from $40. The company's annual household penetration is giving investors a false sense of security and the pandemic conditions over the past few years have made the metric less reliable, the analyst told investors in a research note.
- UBS analyst Steven Fisher downgraded Caterpillar to Neutral from Buy with a price target of $230, up from $225. While the company's earnings power remains underappreciated, the stock's risk/reward is now more balanced, Fisher told investors in a research note.
- Wells Fargo analyst Steven Cahall downgraded Paramount to Underweight from Equal Weight with a price target of $13, down from $19. The analyst says he can no longer justify a premium multiple for the shares given his more negative view on linear trends and an uncertain direct-to-consumer outlook.
Top 5 Initiations:
- Jefferies analyst Kyle McNealy initiated coverage of Dell Technologies with a Hold rating and $39 price target. While he sees enterprise digitization driving "solid demand for computing and storage," and thinks virtual and hybrid work should transform Dell's PC businesses from stability to growth, the analyst believes near-term PC weakness could lead to some margin compression and views the current valuation as "a reasonable discount to peers."
- KeyBanc analyst Justin Patterson initiated coverage of Bumble with a Sector Weight rating and no price target. The company can continue to grow revenue in the 'high-teens" annually, but inflation and competition could pressure its margins, Patterson told investors in a research note.
- Jefferies analyst Kyle McNealy initiated coverage of NetApp with a Buy rating and $88 price target. The analyst likes NetApp's data center exposure and sees a positive medium-term demand environment driven by digitization and data growth.
- Wells Fargo analyst Stan Berenshteyn initiated coverage of Veeva with an Equal Weight rating and $180 price target. The analyst views Veeva as the "last mover" software vendor for commercial and pre-commercial pharma R&D efforts.
- Wells Fargo analyst Stan Berenshteyn initiated coverage of Doximity with an Overweight rating and $38 price target. Doximity is positioned to capture more wallet share and to benefit from growth of digital ad marketing budgets, Berenshteyn argued.
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