The Top 5 Analyst Calls of the Week (GE, NFLX, NVDA, POT, VZ)

Analyst calls from Wall Street are sometimes great and sometimes not.  We look each week for those standout research calls that are above the grain or are outside of the pack.  Some calls are praise, some are critical.  The goal is not to just find bullish calls, but calls which have a longer duration of a single trading session or even a single week.  We identified five top standout research calls or groups of calls in the individual names of General Electric Co. (NYSE: GE), Netflix, Inc. (NASDAQ: NFLX), NVIDIA Corporation (NASDAQ: NVDA), Potash Corp. of Saskatchewan, Inc. (NYSE: POT), and Verizon Communications Inc. (NYSE: VZ).

General Electric Co. (NYSE: GE) has already enjoyed a rather nice run-up.  After earnings and Jeff  Immelt’s presidential appointment, shares are up almost another 10% just 10 days ago. They  hit a new 52-week high of $20.74 on Friday before the market mess.  On Friday morning came an upgrade from an independent equity research firm called Argus.  The firm raised the rating to “Buy” and it now has a $26.00 price target that implies almost 30% more of upside.  The basis for the call is higher equipment orders continuing, loan loss reductions continuing at GE Capital and strength in most business segments.  The firm is now above-street estimates for both 2011 and fo 2012 and the consensus price target from Thomson Reuters is  $22.50.  Point and figure charts are not our favorite, but the new preliminary objective price target for a total breakout in GE shares appears to be as high as $31.50 per stockcharts.com data after having shown a reading of closer to $26.00 back before earning.

Netflix, Inc. (NASDAQ: NFLX) silenced all the naysayers.  Excessive valuation just doesn’t matter sometimes.  This week we saw many analysts come out with upgrades after it blew away earnings and continues to see growth.  Most analysts had already downgraded the stock because of valuations long before earnings and it looked as though the short sellers were going to have their day.  It wasn’t so.  This batch of research calls is far from praise and far from admiration because these calls are so after-the-fact.  Still, this batch of calls was one of the biggest standouts of the week.  Netflix won this round of earnings hands down. Just some of the upgrades were as follows: Raised to “Market Perform” at Morgan Keegan, ThinkEquity raised the rating to “Buy” with a $220 target; Canaccord Genuity raised its target to $250 from $225; Pacific Crest raised its rating to “outperform” and gave a $270 target; Bank of America Merrill Lynch raised its rating to “Buy” and gave a whopping $275.00 price target. Netflix was one of the positive stocks on Friday and closed out at $217.98 versus $183.03 before earnings.

NVIDIA Corporation (NASDAQ: NVDA) did not have as strong of a week as it had started out.  The Friday before was a price of $22.22 and it closed at $24.73 this last Monday for a gain of 11.3%.  Shares slid on Friday with the markets.  The call here is actually not a brokerage firm’s analyst that drove shares higher.  It was a long report in Barron’s last weekend called “The Next Picture Show,” and the technology author Jay Palmer wrote that shares could still practically double ahead and could approach $40.00 based in part on a Raymond James outlook.  Whether you want to credit this to Raymond James or to Barron’s is up to you, but NVIDIA was the biggest of the surprises this last week.

Potash Corp. of Saskatchewan, Inc. (NYSE: POT) had great earnings, gave very positive data for continued pricing trends in potash, raised its dividend, and even declared a 3 for 1 stock split all this last week.  Maybe this one doesn’t need analyst catch-up games to be pointed out, but the price targets were jacked up by what felt like almost everyone. These were some of the price target objectives we saw RAISED this week:  to $204 from $170 at RBC; to $173 from $168 at Scotia; to $198 from $165 at Barclays; to $190 from $175 at BMO; to $165 from $155 by TD; to $190 from $185 at UBS; and to $207 from $185 at Canaccord Genuity.  Those are not all the firms either.  The one apart from the crowd was a CIBC downgrade to “Sector Perform” from “Sector Outperform.”

Verizon Communications Inc. (NYSE: VZ) is soon to get the Apple iPhone on February 10, but this is all already known.  It is also getting further into the cloud with the acquisition of Terremark.  What was interesting was that Goldman Sachs decided to put Verizon on its prized Conviction Buy List and it has a near-street-high target of $42.00 per share.  The consensus estimates is only $36.33 from Thomson Reuters, but that figure is likely to rise when the lines are forming outside of the Verizon stores again on February 10.

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JON C. OGG