Top Analyst Upgrades and Downgrades: Lululemon, Priceline, Sprint, Tesla, Twitter and More

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By Jon C. Ogg Published
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Earnings season is now winding down and stocks keep challenging new all-time highs. Now investors and traders alike are starting to decide how to best position their assets for 2014. Each morning 24/7 Wall St. reviews dozens of Wall Street research reports looking for new ideas for our readers. Some are stocks to buy and others end up being stocks to sell. These are this Wednesday’s top analyst upgrades, downgrades and initiations seen from Wall Street research firms.

Lululemon Athletica Inc. (NASDAQ: LULU) was maintained as Outperform with a $78 price target (versus a $66.75 close) at Credit Suisse. The firm said that inventory challenges are moderating and it evaluated more than 4,000 Lululemon SKUs on the company’s online store to believe that persistent supply chain and inventory challenges are being resolved. It also showed that online apparel in-stock levels and SKU counts across genders have increased substantially since the end of August, and the firm now expects comparable store sales to get back up to high-single or low-double digits going forward.

Pricline.com Inc. (NASDAQ: PCLN) was maintained as Buy but was added to the prized Conviction Buy List at Goldman Sachs. Where this call gets very interesting is that the price target was raised to $1,500 from $1,260 in the call, after closing at $1,118 on Tuesday and against a 52-week range of $597.15 to $1145.00. This call just feels very late to the party, but shares are indicated up more than 2%.

Sprint Corp. (NYSE: S) was maintained as Underperform with a downside price target of $5.50 (versus a $7.49 close) at Credit Suisse. The firm believes its valuation does not reflect the risk that the turnaround could take longer than expected or could even fail to materialize. It pointed out that Sprint trades at an estimated EV/EBITDA multiple of 7.0 times for 2015, versus a range of 5.7 times to 6.5 times for the rest of the group. Another issue is Sprint’s aim of network parity with its peers in 2014, but the concern is that it is not likely to achieve meaningfully faster speeds than peers until the company deploys a 3×20 carrier aggregation on 2.5 GHz spectrum in late 2015.

Tesla Inc. (NASDAQ: TSLA) was maintained as Equal Weight at Barclays, but the firm is warning of downside into the NHTSA probe. Barclays believes that shares could fall into the $90s as the investigation could take up to six months and create demand destruction of 10% to 20% from the buyers. Barclays officially lowered its price target to $120 from $141 on the call.

Twitter Inc. (NYSE: TWTR) was started as Neutral at BTIG. Also, Cantor Fitzgerald lowered its official rating from Buy to Hold, but that target price is down at $32 as this was a pre-IPO valuation call. We already showed an analyst montage of Twitter showing all the firms covering it.

Other analyst calls are as follows:

Best Buy Co. Inc. (NYSE: BBY) was raised to Buy from Neutral at Citigroup.

Boeing Co. (NYSE: BA) was downgraded to Perform from Outperform at Oppenheimer, and the firm removed its $140 price target based on it being mostly achieved.

Consolidated Edison Inc. (NYSE: ED) was downgraded to Hold from Buy at Argus, based on revised rate case assumptions.

Groupon Inc. (NASDAQ: GRPN) was reiterated as Buy with a 412.00 price target (versus a $9.82 closing price) at Sterne Agee.

Medtronic Inc. (NYSE: MDT) was downgraded to Hold from Buy after earnings, based on soft sales and market share losses, at Argus.

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About the Author Jon C. Ogg →

Jon Ogg has been a financial news analyst since 1997. Mr. Ogg set up one of the first audio squawk box services for traders called TTN, which he sold in 2003. He has previously worked as a licensed broker to some of the top U.S. and E.U. financial institutions, managed capital, and has raised private capital at the seed and venture stage. He has lived in Copenhagen, Denmark, as well as New York and Chicago, and he now lives in Houston, Texas. Jon received a Bachelor of Business Administration in finance at University of Houston in 1992. a673b.bigscoots-temp.com.

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