Thursday’s top analyst upgrades and downgrades included many key companies in the technology sector. Advanced Micro Devices Inc. (NASDAQ: AMD) was downgraded to Market Perform from Outperform with a $30 price target by analyst Gus Richard of Northland Securities. This is one of those analyst calls that actually has some hallmarks of an upgrade, even if it is a formal downgrade.
Thursday’s downgrade cited that the sentiment in AMD shares has risen to levels between optimistic and euphoric. As a reminder, AMD stock is up about 150% over the past year, compared with a 17% gain for the S&P 500. And it should also be noted that while this is a formal rating downgrade, the Northland price target was raised to $30 from $26.
The firm does expect AMD’s numbers to rise ahead, and the stock could continue to outperform as investors are chasing up performance, but the firm also noted irrational expectations in the growth of its financial performance.
Also worth noting were limits to server growth after prior reports of AMD gaining market share. And on Intel Corp. (NASDAQ: INTC), the coming Cascade Lake products are expected to significantly boost the performance of artificial intelligence applications in the data centers. The report noted how AMD was expected to still pose a challenge to Intel ahead, but that the valuations and sentiment have changed since it was first positive on AMD.
AMD closed down 1.17% at $32.19 on Wednesday, and its shares were last seen down 0.8% at $31.92 late on Thursday morning after the downgrade had soaked in.
AMD still had a consensus analyst target price closer to $25 ahead of this call, mainly due to analysts being behind the stock performance. AMD has a 52-week trading range of $9.04 to $31.14.
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