While Fools should generally take the opinion of Wall Street with a grain of salt, it's not a bad idea to take a closer look at particularly stock-shaking upgrades and downgrades -- just in case their reasoning behind the call makes sense.
What: Shares of Informatica Corporation (INFA) gained nearly 3% this morning after Credit Suisse upgraded the data software technologist from Neutral to Outperform.
So what: Along with the upgrade, analyst Michael Nemeroff boosted his price target to $52, representing about 22% worth of upside to yesterday's close. While contrarians might be turned off by Informatica's hot stock price in recent months, Nemeroff thinks there's plenty of room to run given his forecast of continued market share gains in 2014.
Now what: Credit Suisse expects the data integration market to continue to accelerate, with Informatica being a big beneficiary. "As INFA's internal execution issues continue to abate, evidenced in its strong results over the last 2-3 qtrs, we anticipate that INFA could once again be a share gainer in DI, and accelerate its organic license growth above +10% in 2014 for the first time in a few years," noted Nemeroff. "[A]nnual organic license revenue growth above +10% (over a normal 2013 comp) could cause more growth investors to revisit the name after abandoning it when growth decelerated in 2012." When you couple those steadily improving growth prospects with Informatica's rock-solid financial position, it's tough to disagree with Credit Suisse's bullishness.
