What happened
On an ugly day for the stock market, even positive news for the handsomest companies couldn't lift their share prices higher. So it was for cloud computing specialist Twilio (TWLO 1.47%), which despite a hopeful new analyst note saw its stock trade down by over 6% on the day.
So what
KeyBanc analysts Thomas Blakey and Christopher Valley resumed their company's coverage of no less than 15 stocks in the infrastructure software segment; one of the prominent names was Twilio. The prognosticators have quite a favorable view of the stock, as they tagged it with an overweight (read: buy) recommendation at a price target of $96 per share.
The analysts wrote that they feel Twilio is "well positioned to capitalize on its engagement strategy, including selling an integrated customer data platform solution enabling better engagement and related ROI for customers and lifting company gross margins in the process."
All things being equal, such a bullish take should have continued pushing up Twilio's share price, which enjoyed a nearly 5% rise on Monday. However, a worse-than-expected inflation readout from the government's Bureau of Labor Statistics spooked many investors, and sent them scurrying away from investments considered to be relatively risky -- like tech stocks. Twilio, along with many other peers in the sector, couldn't escape that panic.
Now what
This might have been compounded by existing worries about Twilio's growth prospects. After all, in the company's most recent earnings report, management proffered revenue guidance for its current (third) quarter, forecasting year-over-year growth of 30% to 32%. That's well under the 41% of the trailing quarter.
