MSFT - Microsoft Corporation
| Previous Close | 137.78 |
| Open | 137.19 |
| Bid | 133.51 x 2200 |
| Ask | 133.69 x 1000 |
| Day's Range | 132.80 - 138.35 |
| 52 Week Range | 93.96 - 141.68 |
| Volume | 38,515,386 |
| Avg. Volume | 24,790,431 |
| Market Cap | 1.018T |
| Beta (3Y Monthly) | 0.97 |
| PE Ratio (TTM) | 26.36 |
| EPS (TTM) | 5.06 |
| Earnings Date | Oct 22, 2019 - Oct 28, 2019 |
| Forward Dividend & Yield | 1.84 (1.34%) |
| Ex-Dividend Date | 2019-08-14 |
| 1y Target Est | 154.41 |
- CNET
Microsoft contractors listened in on Xbox users, Apple TV Plus pricing
This week's most important tech stories include a report claiming Microsoft contractors listened in on Xbox users, possible pricing for Apple TV Plus and Apple Arcade.
- GuruFocus.com
Michael Burry of 'Big Short' Fame Goes Long GameStop
The struggling video game retailer may be poised to jump as next-generation consoles hit the market Continue reading...
- TipRanks
5 ‘Strong Buy’ Stocks Hedge Funds Love Right Now
If you are looking for some fresh investing inspiration, look no further. Hedge funds have just revealed their second quarter trades, and the results are now in. RBC Capital has analyzed the 2Q19 13f’s of 363 major hedge funds with significant stakes in US equities. And from this data it has compiled a list of hedge funds’ most popular stocks right now i.e. stocks with the most hedge fund dollars invested. “In our experience, crowded names among active managers, including hedge funds, are usually crowded for a reason (good fundamentals). Most of our baskets of crowded names have outperformed since we started tracking the data at the end of 2010, and our stats can be used to make the case for hedge fund management” comments the firm. Nonetheless the firm does add that positioning is still a risk factor worth monitoring. After all, outperformance of popular hedge fund longs has occurred against the backdrop of strong growth leadership in the market “and may merely reflect the underlying style bias of the market that has been in place” says RBC Capital. Notably 60% of the list falls in TIMT (technology, internet, media and telecommunications), down from 70% last quarter.Here we take a closer look at five top stocks that feature in the Top 20 list. What’s more all these stocks also score a ‘Strong Buy’ analyst consensus, based on all the ratings over the last three months. Let’s see which five stocks make the grade now: 1\. Microsoft (MSFT)Microsoft refused to give up its no. 1 position in the second quarter. It remains the most popular hedge fund stock- despite a sizable decline in the number of funds owning the stock (for the second quarter in a row). Indeed, RBC Capital reveals that hedge funds still hold a whopping $18,131 million of Microsoft shares. That’s with 29% of the 363 funds that it examined holding MSFT stock. Luckily for these funds MSFT scores a firm ‘Strong Buy’ analyst consensus. That's with a $154 average price target (15% upside potential). Out of 24 analysts covering MSFT right now, 22 are bullish with only 1 hold rating and 1 sell rating (from long time MSFT bear Jefferies' John Difucci). “We maintain a bullish stance on MSFT as one of our top cloud ideas to own in 2019 based on a multiyear transformation of the model driven by commercial cloud revenue that could reach $100B in CY23 from a $44B run-rate today” celebrated KeyBanc analyst Brent Bracelin after the company reported a solid revenue beat on commercial cloud growth of 39% y/y.Aptly calling his report ‘On Cloud Nine’, the analyst reiterated his MSFT buy rating while ramping up the price target from $143 to $155. Fiscal 4Q19 results impressed as it sustained double-digit growth for the eighth consecutive quarter, despite a material two-point FX headwind, summed up Bracelin. 2\. Facebook (FB)Facebook shifted up a notch in the second quarter. The social media giant is now the third favorite hedge fund stock, up from fourth place in Q1. That’s due to Alphabet Inc (GOOGL) slipping from 2 to 4 in the quarter after seeing a double-digit decline in ownership. In contrast, six new funds bought into FB in Q2.According to RBC Capital, 34% of the funds it tracks hold Facebook stock, while the total value of the holding comes out at $16,191 million (so still quite a way off Microsoft). Analysts share this bullish outlook. With 33 out of 36 analysts calling FB a buy, the $234 average price target suggests over 30% upside lies ahead. Rosenblatt Securities analyst Mark Zgutowicz believes that the demand picture for FB properties could not be stronger. “We maintain our Buy rating and $242 PT on FB shares and would be aggressive buyers on any weakness related to the 4Q guide deceleration” he instructed investors recently. Demand for the feeds remains high, says Zgutowicz, given stellar ROAS [return on ad spend] and Stories ad tests are steadily progressing at still a low bar for the stock. “Our checks with direct response advertisers continue to point to stellar ROAS on the triple strength targeting platform of News Feed (NF), Messenger and Instagram” he concluded. 3\. Netflix (NFLX)Netflix is hedge funds’ fifth most popular stock. Funds have now invested a jaw-dropping $10,504 million in the stock, with two new funds creating NFLX positions in Q2. As a result, just over a fifth of the funds polled hold NFLX in their portfolio. So does this mean we have a buying opportunity at hand? After all the stock has pulled back significantly following disappointing earnings results. According to the Street, the answer seems to be yes. The stock is showing a Strong Buy consensus with an average price target of $423. This translates into considerable upside potential of 45%. “It’s still early in the quarter, but data through July looks solid (rebound from 2Q),” commented SunTrust Robinson’s Matthew Thornton on August 19. “Google searches (on keyword “Netflix”) and mobile app downloads for the month also show nice upticks vs 2Q19 and back toward or above the 1Q19 high-water-mark.”Although NFLX lost 126,000 US customers in the second quarter, Thornton believes popular series like Sacred Games, The Crown and Peaky Blinders can help stem the losses. With this in mind, the analyst reiterated his NFLX buy rating and $402 price target. A similar message comes from Bernstein analyst Todd Juenger. “The defining question for investors coming out of Netflix [second quarter] is whether the subscriber miss was simply natural variation (tied to a price increase) in a long-term growth trajectory, in other words a ‘blip,” he told investors. “We think the case for ‘this is a blip’ is compelling.” Clearly hedge funds think so too. 4\. Boeing (BA)Boeing was a new name to the Top 20 hedge fund list in Q2. The world’s largest aerospace company now features in 19% of the 363 funds in RBC’s study (with 9 funds creating new positions in the quarter). These funds own a total of $5,458 million of BA stock.And on the whole analysts would approve of the fund enthusiasm for BA. If we look at only the Street’s best-performing analysts, the consensus works out at ‘Strong Buy.’ Plus the $429 average analyst price target indicates 20% upside lies ahead. Of course, all eyes are on Boeing’s 737 Max plane, which suffered two fatal crashes in a five-month span and is currently grounded. According to Bloomberg, there about 600 planes now out of service. However, the Federal Aviation Authority (FAA) just indicated that the model could be ungrounded come October. “We continue to support the FAA and global regulators on the safe return of the Max to service,” Boeing said in a statement. Following the latest news, five-star Cowen & Co analyst Cai Rumohr reiterated his buy rating with a bullish $460 price target (29% upside potential). He sees a 3-to-1 positive risk-reward around the FAA certification, and expects the stock to react to early indicators of success/failure.“MAX recovery profile looks intact, and FAA certification flight could be 4-6 weeks off -- a key milestone for the stock” Rumohr said. “Traffic growth, 787 demand, 777x schedule are "watch" items; but they are offset by robust 787 cash generation.” Bottom line: BA remains the analyst’s top pick for cash flow per share of $30+ (9-10% yield) in 2020 & 2021. 5\. Union Pacific Corp (UNP) Union Pacific is a leading railroad franchise, covering 23 states in the western two-thirds of the United States. Like BA, UNP is a new addition to the Top 20 list of hedge fund stock holdings. Eight new funds created UNP positions in Q2, while the total $ value owned now stands at $5,157 million. We can also see that 15% of funds in RBC’s study own Union Pacific.So what’s driving this wave of bullish sentiment? Well, the company just posted a 2Q EPS and EBIT beat and a record operating ratio despite being significantly hindered by flooding. “We raise our estimates and PT and continue recommending UNP as a top pick” five-star Cowen & Co analyst Jason Seidl wrote following earnings. He now sees shares hitting $184 vs his previous $180 price target. “UNP is one of the best managed North American Class I railroads and the only western one that is publicly traded” stated Seidl. With the hire of Jim Vena as COO, he believes the company is on its way to revenue improvement.That’s thanks to the adoption of Precision Scheduled Railroading (PSR). Created by the late Hunter Harrison, PSR refers to the principle of generating extra revenues by using fewer railcars and locomotives. According to Seidl, UNP's precision scheduled railroading rollout is on the right track so far. He notes, for instance, a 10% increase in train length that has seen UNP increase their parked locomotives to 2,150. Find analysts’ favorite stocks with the Top Analysts’ Stocks tool
- Motley Fool
Survey: 82% of Workers Try to Keep Their Social Media From Employers
Some use aliases, others try privacy settings, and 50% don't think companies should be allowed to look.
- Barrons.com
The University of Notre Dame Bought Up Netflix Stock, and Sold Microsoft and Alphabet
The University of Notre Dame’s investment office has “a long-term orientation to our investment partnerships and approach.” But the university made big changes in its U.S.-traded stock investments in the relatively short time frame of the second quarter.
- Motley Fool
Bill Gates Says This Type of AI Will Be Worth “10 Microsofts”
Artificial Intelligence is set to change the world according to several billionaires. Here are seven stocks riding the AI wave.
- Kiplinger
12 Tech Stocks That Wall Street Loves the Most
Markets have been so volatile this summer on U.S.-China trade tensions that investors might not have noticed: Tech stocks are absolutely red-hot in 2019.Indeed, the technology sector of Standard & Poor's 500-stock index is leading the broader market by a mile this year, with a year-to-date gain of 29% through Aug. 21. By comparison, the S&P; 500 is up about 17%, while the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite Index has risen 21%. (The second-best performing sector is real estate, up 25%.)Stellar gains are always welcome, but they do pose a challenge for investors. After such a big run-up, is there anything left worth buying at current levels?Analyst sure think so. Between momentum and the sector's outsize growth prospects, plenty of tech stocks have nowhere near topped out, they say.To see which picks analysts like best at this point, we screened the Nasdaq Composite for the top-rated small, midsize and large tech stocks. S&P; Global Market Intelligence surveys analysts' ratings on stocks and scores them on a five-point scale, where 1.0 equals Strong Buy and 5.0 means Strong Sell. Any score of 2.0 or lower means that analysts, on average, rate the stock a Buy. The closer the score gets to 1.0, the better.Here are the 12 tech stocks the analysts love right now. This group is broken down into the four best-rated stock picks in the small-, mid- and large-cap spaces. SEE ALSO: All 30 Dow Stocks Ranked: The Analysts Weigh In
- Insider Monkey
Lone Pine Capital 2019 Q2 Investor Letter
Lone Pine Capital's flagship hedge fund outperformed the S&P 500 Index by nearly 8 percentage points per year since its inception in 1998. But that's mostly because of its tremendous success in the earlier years of the fund. Nowadays Lone Pine's returns go hand in hand with the market. For example, last year Lone Pine's […]
- American City Business Journals
Is your company's technology accessible? Microsoft director weighs in
Code PaLOUsa, a three-day tech conference in Louisville, brought in Gianugo Rabellino, Microsoft’s director of accessibility for the cloud and artificial intelligence (AI), to address many of the issues present because of the lack of accessibility in the tech industry.
- Investor's Business Daily
Dow Jones Dives 550 Points As Microsoft Faces This Key Sell Signal
The Dow Jones Industrial Average, Nasdaq and Russell 2000 showed deep declines in another bearish session for stocks. Microsoft is yielding recent gains.
- Zacks
3 Large-Cap Tech Stocks for Dividend Investors to Buy After Powell Update
As bond yields slip, we searched using the Zacks Stock Screener for large-cap technology firms that also pay a dividend. Here are 3 of the strong tech stocks that came through our screen this morning...
- Investor's Business Daily
Is Shopify Stock A Buy Right Now? Here's What Earnings, SHOP Charts Show
Shopify stock has been a huge winner in 2019. Shopify earnings are booming and the company plans to compete more with Amazon. But is SHOP stock a buy now?
- Investor's Business Daily
Is Salesforce Stock A Buy? Investors Mull Digital Transformation Amid Acquisitions
CRM stock has lagged software group peers as investors digest big acquisitions, such as Tableau. Could digital transformation growth drive a Salesforce stock rally.
- American City Business Journals
Survey: More than 80 percent of employees at Adobe, Intel, Cisco see cost-cutting at work
A vast majority of employees queried at Cisco Systems and several other big Silicon Valley tech employers say they've noticed cost-cutting at work.
- Motley Fool
Is Microsoft the New Safe Haven Stock?
"Tech" and "blue chip" aren't mutually exclusive...
- Motley Fool
Microsoft Management Talks Commercial Cloud and LinkedIn
CFO Amy Hood helps investors better understand these two growth drivers.
- Investor's Business Daily
These Are The Best Tech Stocks To Buy And Watch Now
The best tech stocks to buy and watch aren't hard to find, as long as you know you're fishing in the right pond. That means targeting top stocks showing resilience and holding near highs.
- Simply Wall St.
Should You Like Microsoft Corporation’s (NASDAQ:MSFT) High Return On Capital Employed?
Today we'll look at Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) and reflect on its potential as an investment. To be precise...
- Investopedia
10 Most-Loved Stocks in Hedge Funds: Goldman's VIP List
Goldman Sachs’ “Hedge Fund VIP List”—containing the 50 most popular stocks among hedge fund portfolios—has outperformed the broader market for the past 18 years. The Hedge Fund VIP basket has beaten the market by an average 50 bps in every quarter since 2001. The list is a tool that investors can use to “follow the smart money,” wrote Goldman’s analysts in their most recent Hedge Fund Trend Monitor report, which analyzes a group of 835 distinct hedge funds.
- American City Business Journals
California companies drive up competition, cost for Seattle tech talent
Seattle software engineers make an average $116,500 base salary a year, and California companies broadening their Seattle-area bases drive those figures up.
- Yahoo Finance
Samsung’s Galaxy Note10+ is a big-screen powerhouse with a big price tag
Samsung's Galaxy Note10+ is a powerful smartphone with a big price tag.
- Motley Fool
Zoom Video Communications: 4 Things to Watch In the Next Earnings Report
Zoom's valuation corresponds to high expectations.
- InvestorPlace
IBM Stock and Jim Whitehurst’s Toughest Test
After some brief excitement following the closing of its Red Hat deal, International Business Machines (NYSE:IBM) stock is back in the doldrums.Source: JHVEPhoto / Shutterstock.com Shares were due to open Aug. 22 at about $134.20. They're down 7.5% over the last year, and almost 30% over the last five years. Shareholders are still getting a $1.62 per share dividend that yields 4.84%, but Red Hat blew a huge hole in the balance sheet and IBM stock price. IBM debt on June 30 was over $58 billion. * 10 Marijuana Stocks That Could See 100% Gains, If Not More IBM needs a new story to tell. Red Hat, and the "open hybrid cloud," is that story. IBM has created Open Shift "Cloud Packs" for all its hardware, with hopes of making all computers into clouds. This includes IBM Z-Series mainframes.InvestorPlace - Stock Market News, Stock Advice & Trading Tips Whitehurst for IBM CEO?What analysts say they want from IBM stock is Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst in current CEO Virginia Rometty's chair. They want Red Hat running IBM.That wasn't the promise when this deal was put together. The promise was that Red Hat would get autonomy from IBM, not that IBM would lose its autonomy to Red Hat. But Whitehurst's concept of an Open Organization has excited analysts who don't even know what it is.If IBM became an Open Organization, these analysts think, it would replace the top-down structure IBM has used for a century with an organic system in which employees and customers are part of the product design process. Instead of selling gear or even solutions, IBM would become a corporate change agent.But IBM has spent decades getting to this low point, dumping older workers and paying those who remain less than competitors.Rometty's IBM is a hollowed-out shell, analysts think, dedicated solely to its dividend and hierarchies. Can Whitehurst really teach it to dance? Everybody Gets a CloudThe 2010s have become the "cloud decade" with $4.5 trillion of market cap locked inside just five companies with scaled networks of cloud data centers.Whitehurst's vision is that every company and organization gets its own cloud, using the clouds of Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN), Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT), and Alphabet (NASDAQ:GOOGL) seamlessly, and only when needed.This is now IBM's vision. So, the analysts ask, why isn't Whitehurst running IBM?It's because IBM also has a host of other software and hardware platforms, including older, proprietary Unix operating systems, and the Z-Series software of its mainframes. They are on what senior Vice President for Cloud Arvind Krishna calls a "multi-year journey" toward compatibility.In short, it will take years for IBM stock to become what Whitehurst wants it to sell.IBM also has other irons in the fire besides cloud. The company has been spending big on artificial intelligence, on machine learning, and on blockchain. The Bottom Line on IBM StockInternational Business Machines has been run like an old-fashioned industrial organization for decades. Even if Whitehurst became CEO tomorrow, it would take him years to transform the company.IBM shareholders are income investors focused on the dividend, which costs IBM nearly $1.5 billion to service each quarter. Then there's the interest on that debt which, even at 5% would cost nearly $3 billion a year to service. So far, IBM's only financial response to Red Hat has been to halt its stock buybacks, on which it spent $1.2 billion in the last year.IBM earned $8.7 billion in 2018 and could hit that mark again, assuming its third quarter earnings come in as expected. Whether it can be transformed and perform like a real tech company is purely speculative at this point.But if it can, the gains would be huge. Oracle (NASDAQ:ORCL), considered stodgy by Silicon Valley standards, is worth $177 billion with sales of $40 billion. IBM is worth $113 billion on sales of $79 billion. IBM is a long-shot speculation with a 5% yield.Dana Blankenhorn is a financial and technology journalist. He is the author of the environmental story, Bridget O'Flynn and the Bear, available at the Amazon Kindle store. Write him at danablankenhorn@gmail.com or follow him on Twitter at @danablankenhorn. As of this writing he owned shares in AMZN and MSFT. More From InvestorPlace * 2 Toxic Pot Stocks You Should Avoid * 10 Marijuana Stocks That Could See 100% Gains, If Not More * 11 Stocks Under $10 to Buy Now * 6 China Stocks to Buy on the Dip The post IBM Stock and Jim Whitehurstas Toughest Test appeared first on InvestorPlace.
- Market Realist
Slack Stock: Will a ‘Buy’ Rating and Soros’s Entry Help?
Today, Slack (WORK) opened 4.5% higher after MKM Partners analyst Rohit Kulkarni gave Slack stock a "buy" rating with a target price of $40.
- Investing.com
GameStop Jumps After Reports ‘Big Short's’ Burry is Long
Investing.com - Shares of GameStop (NYSE:GME) surged in midday trade on Thursday after Barron’s reported that investor Michael Burry is long on the stock.
