What happened
Many Shopify (SHOP 0.14%) investors spent Thursday's trading session weighing two very different new analyst reports on the company. As a result its share price see-sawed quite a bit during the day, at one point dropping 5% below Wednesday's close before recovering to a slight 0.4% gain. To say that recent opinion on this stock is divided is a real understatement.
So what
The day didn't begin auspiciously for Shopify analyses. Before market open, UBS initiated coverage on the e-commerce facilitator with a firm sell recommendation at $30 per share; it currently trades close to $40.
The Swiss bank's analyst Kunal Madhukar is concerned that consensus estimates for the company don't take into account a very possible recessionary environment in the first quarter of next year. He also pointed out that Amazon is competing effectively in the company's space, and could be a threat to Shopify in the long run.
Madhukar isn't the only prognosticator finding his inner bull with Shopify. His downbeat take on the stock follows a similarly pessimistic analysis by Wolfe Research's Deepak Mathivanan, who in a note on top e-commerce stocks said that Shopify's share price has recently been inflated by a "relief rally" that has left the shares very richly valued.
Now what
Yet Shopify is a stock that still has a great many believers. Their confidence was surely boosted by another analyst publishing a note on the stock later Thursday morning, specifically Mizuho Securities' Siti Panigrahi. He raised his price target on Shopify shares considerably, boosting his level to $40 per share from the preceding $33.
