Twitter Analyst Quiet Period Ends, Some Serious Upside Expected

We would remind readers that many analysts issued their own reports and their own Buy, Sell or Hold ratings ahead of these analysts. The new calls today were as follows:

• Started as Equal Weight at Morgan Stanley
• Started as Neutral with a $40 price target at J.P. Morgan
• Started as Underperform with a $36 price target at Bank of America Merrill Lynch
• Started as Buy with a whopping $50 price target at Deutsche Bank
• Started as Buy with a $46 price target at Goldman Sachs

Again, many analysts have issued research reports with formal Buy, Sell and Hold recommendations and with price targets. Most of them seemed cautious, based on the valuation, even if they were bullish on the business metrics. These prior calls were as follows:

• BTIG: Neutral rating.
• Cantor Fitzgerald: Started as Buy pre-IPO, then was downgraded to an official Hold rating.
• Evercore Partners: Overweight, but this was also before Twitter opened and its price target was $43.
• Morningstar: Sell, with a $26 fair value target.
• Pivotal Research: Downgrade alert on the day of the IPO, saying it should fall to a $30.00 price target.
• RBC Capital Markets: Outperform rating initially, but its price target was down at $33.
• R.W. Baird: Neutral rating.
• S&P Equity Research: Sell, along with a $30 price target at 500 times its expected 2015 earnings per share.
• Susquehanna: Neutral rating.
• Sterne Agee: Neutral rating and assigned downside price target valuations, as the base case should be worth at least $25 to $32 in the next 12 to 24 months.
• UBS: Neutral rating and a $45 price target.
• Wedbush Morgan: Neutral rating.
• Wunderlich Securities: Sell rating and $34 target.
• Wells Fargo: Market Perform rating and a valuation range of $36 to $39.

Twitter shares were down 1.6% at $40.93 after about 90 minutes of trading Monday. Its post-IPO trading range has been $38.80 to $50.09.