Here are Tuesday’s biggest calls on Wall Street: Barclays reiterates Apple as equal weight Barclays said it sees failure when Apple reports earnings on Thursday. “What started as production-driven cuts has turned into weak demand across all product categories. We are also concerned about slowing growth in services. With a 20% premium over at the S&P 500, we consider the stock to be valued at best.” Morgan Stanley reiterates Lucid Group is underweight Morgan Stanley said the electric vehicle company’s fundamental outlook is “deteriorating”. “Like many EV start-up names, Lucid needs to ride out execution headwinds in a year where we will see severe EV deflation.” Atlantic Equities downgrades Bank of America to neutral after overweight Atlantic Equities has expressed concern about the banking giant’s slowing growth. “BAC downgrade to Neutral. With the rise in NII (net interest income) now largely priced in for 2023, attention is beginning to turn to the potential decline in NIM (net interest margin) in 2024 and the wind Read more about this call here Deutsche Bank reiterates Disney buy Deutsche Bank said it was backing Disney shares ahead of earnings on Feb. 8. It wasn’t executed the way it was. Bob Iger would/will run it.” CFRA downgrades Dollar Tree to sell pending) continued inflationary pressures (particularly in labor and store overhead); 2) continued negative shift in sales mix towards low-margin consumables; 3) investments in stores, labor and pricing in Family Dollar.” Bank of America reiterates Alphabet as it buys Bank of America said Alphabet continues to pull the right “cost levers in challenging environment.” group in 2023 with greater relative earnings stability given the utility of research, flexible spending, healthy margins that will minimize cash flow challenges, and the ability to support stocks with buyouts. the semiconductor company and said it expects the stock to outperform. “We are opening a positive catalytic watch on the buy-rated LRCX and expect the The stock outperformed the group after a relative underperformance of around 1,300 basis points over the past six months due to weak end-use memory demand and investment. reduce concerns.” UBS downgrades Nokia to neutral after purchase UBS said it expects a “tough” market for Nokia. believes revenue/EBIT growth will normalize due to spike in 5G investment in the US States and growing cost pressure.” Bank of America upgrades FleetCor to buy from neutral bank Bank of America said in its fuel card payment company upgrade that FleetCor is addressing the challenges “head on. “We are upgrading FleetCor to buy (from neutral) and increasing our purchase order to $240 based on a multiple of 14 times PE over our 2023 EPS estimate.” BTIG upgrades New Fortress Energy to buy from neutral BTIG said it sees improving trends for the clean energy company. “NFE has had a rough start to the year with a year-to-date decline of about 11% due to the collapse in natural gas prices, which are down about 30% in the United States and Europe. Warmer weather in Europe helped keep European gas storage levels at a five-year high before February.” Macquarie downgrades Paramount to underperform versus neutral Macquarie said it was concerned about the company’s advertising exposure. “We are downgrading PARA from Neutral to Underperforming. Ad exposure is highest in the peer group at 35% of sales, and ad revenue is likely to be firmly negative in 4Q&23.” Mizuho reiterates Uber buy Mizuho said it was “constructive” that Uber shares would enter earnings on Feb. 8. “With easier comparisons to Omicron’s 1Q23 last year, we believe the setup is positive relative to expectations.” Deutsche Bank reiterates PayPal as it buys Deutsche said it remains optimistic ahead of PayPal’s earnings in early February. “While we remain confident in PYPL’s ability to manage costs and grow EPS in FY23, we will continue to monitor the macro headwinds facing the overall eComm market as well as the stock changes. We are lowering our TP to $100 due to declining peer group valuations.” Wells Fargo Reiterates Ford as Underweight Wells said he sees the automaker cutting prices for electric vehicles even further. “Ford is responding to recent TSLA price cuts by slashing prices for the Ford Mach E. These moves highlighted the industry pricing issues we discussed in Did TSLA Start a Price War? & Pricing Party Over We expect further EV price cuts to follow.” BMO Reiterates Advanced Micro Devices as Outperformer BMO said it was holding the company’s stock ahead of reporting earnings on Tuesday afternoon. “We rate AMD Outperform stock. Many questions have been raised regarding the company’s upcoming earnings, particularly in light of Intel’s report last week, and we had the following thoughts.” Goldman Sachs Reiterates SolarEdge and First Solar as Buyer Goldman said it remains bullish on shares of SolarEdge and First Solar. “At the same time, we see significant margin recovery stories front and center and poised to beat and rise in the near term and to that end we highlight the rise in SEDG and ARRY – which we expect to beat on the back of inflection gross margins – while we also view FSLR as likely to further strengthen its IRA winner status based on strong guidance for 2023.” Lightshed launches Meta as a buyer Lightshed said on its Meta launch that “revenue and earnings growth should outperform significantly.” “While META has rebounded nicely from its lows (Meta is not alone in this), the main driver of our buy rating is now the belief that revenue and earnings growth should significantly outpace investor expectations in 2024 and 2025.”
Top analyst calls on Wall Street include Apple and Alphabet