Here are Wednesday’s biggest calls on Wall Street: Bank of America reiterates Salesforce as buy The firm said Salesforce is still a top pick following earnings on Tuesday. “Margin results suggest that Salesforce continues to operate under a balanced growth philosophy.” Daiwa reiterates Nvidia as outperform The firm raised its price target on Nvidia to $160 per share from $125. “Overachievement continues even as street estimates keep going higher.” KeyBanc upgrades Pinnacle West to overweight from sector weight KeyBanc said it’s bullish on the Arizona utility company. “We are upgrading PNW to Overweight with a $101 PT as we see the AZ regulatory environment improving structurally going forward. In addition, we see the state as well positioned to capitalize on the data economy and industrial load growth, as well as positive population trends.” HSBC upgrades Merck to buy from hold HSBC said it likes “fallen angel stocks” such as the biopharma giant. “In such an environment, we prefer GARP and fallen angel stocks over value names, where we are increasingly more selective. We upgrade Merck & Co and Fresenius Medical Care to Buy (from Hold) and downgrade Novartis to Reduce (from Hold).” JPMorgan upgrades Trimble to overweight from neutral JPMorgan said it sees growth acceleration for the software company. “Ahead of TRMB’s Investor Day on December 10, we are upgrading the shares to Overweight with a Dec 25 PT of $92 based on ~26x FY1 PE. Why upgrade now? Expect acceleration in organic growth on cyclical hardware recovery and stable software growth.” Piper Sandler upgrades Pure Storage to overweight from neutral Piper upgraded the data services platform company following earnings on Tuesday. “Nonetheless, we are upgrading PSTG from Neutral to Overweight as: 1) A significant design win with a top-4 cloud hyperscaler removes risk and creates a catalyst for upside ahead.” Needham reiterates Roku as buy The firm said investors should buy the stock now as the company is likely to be acquired. “We expect Roku to be purchased for a large premium within the next 12 months. We believe that there are several categories of potential purchasers including streamers (NFLX, etc), CTV ad buyers (TTD, etc), retailers (Target, etc), and LLMs (large language models) hungry for billions of new data points daily.” Bernstein reiterates Tesla as underperform Bernstein said it sees too many questions surrounding Tesla’s robotaxi venture. “We struggle to justify Tesla’s valuation, and while we lack a near-term short catalyst, we see risk/reward as negative.” Goldman Sachs reiterates Amazon as buy Goldman said Amazon remains best positioned for the holidays. “We expect that the online consumer will remain resilient but selective in the months ahead and continue to see Amazon.com as the best positioned eCommerce company in our coverage into the holidays.” Citi reiterates Marvell Technology as buy Citi raised its price target on the stock to $112 per share from $91. “Maintain buy and view MRVL as the top custom ASIC [application-specific integrated circuits] compute play into 2025.” UBS initiates Gen Digital as buy UBS said the multinational software company has “double digit EPS growth” potential. “We are launching on GEN with a Buy rating and $36 price target.” Jefferies initiates Coherent as buy Jefferies said the stock has underappreciated “EPS power.” ” Coherent is a materials science company with a focus on optoelectronic components and laser systems/subsystems.” Wolfe initiates GE Vernova as buy Wolfe said it sees upside potential for the GE spinoff company. “We are launching coverage on GEV with an OP rating and YE25 target price of $403. The stock has been a strong outperformer since its separation from GE but we see growth and margin expansion potential well ahead of Street.” Evercore ISI reiterates Apple as outperform Evercore says the “Asia acceleration” continues for Apple as App Store revenue continues to grow. “App Store revenue grew +16% in November, a small acceleration vs the 15% growth rate in October. Apple guided services growth to ~13% in the Dec-qtr, so if App Store revenue can maintain this growth rate it should support some upside.” JPMorgan downgrades M & T Bank to neutral from overweight The firm said the regional bank has too much commercial real estate exposure. “We view MTB’s earnings outlook as solid, with large benefit in 2025 from roll off of receive fixed swaps driving sizable uplift to net interest income (NII). However, we expect its office CRE exposure and relatively lower loan loss reserves to remain a headwind.”
