With stocks sliding and market concerns growing, it's easy to see why analysts have been downgrading stocks or lowering their price targets these days. It makes any upgrades stand out that much more. And even after a rough past week for investors, it's encouraging to see some Wall Street pros kick off the new trading week with positive mentions.
Monday.com (MNDY 2.15%) and Best Buy (BBY -1.35%) are two stocks that are being upgraded on Monday. Let's take a closer look.
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1. Monday.com
If you're going to upgrade Monday.com, you might as well go for maximum style points by doing so on a Monday. Pinjalim Bora at J.P. Morgan is upgrading Monday.com from neutral to overweight. He's also boosting his price target from $130 to $140, implying 27% upside from where it was over the weekend.
Monday.com is a fully customizable cloud platform that can tackle a wide range of tasks in customer relationship management. It's popular and flexible, explaining why there are more than 150,000 customers across 200 industries in over 200 countries leaning on the cloud-based offering.
Growth has slowed from the triple-digit rate it was flashing when it went public last year, but it's still a speedster. Revenue rose 65% in its latest quarter, up 68% if you adjust for foreign exchange fluctuations. The number of its largest customers -- enterprises spending more than $50,000 a year on the platform -- is growing even faster, climbing 116% over the past year.
Monday's net dollar retention rate of 120% is reasonable, but it gets even better as you focus on its largest accounts. Customers that have more than 10 users have seen their net dollar retention rate clock in at 135%. We're looking at a rate of 145% -- meaning that they're spending 45% more over the past year than they were a year earlier -- if we circle back to that group of clients spending at least $50,000 in annual recurring revenue.
A lack of consistent profitability has made Monday.com one of the many fast-growing cloud stocks discarded by the market for reporting red ink. It's not a fashionable look these days. However, with the shares down more than 75% since peaking 13 months ago, Monday.com is finally having a good start to the week.
2. Best Buy
Goldman Sachs analyst Kate McShane believes that Best Buy is a better buy at this point in the holiday shopping season. McShane lifted her call on the stock from sell to neutral on Monday. She sees room for margin improvement in fiscal 2024 and 2025 after the company investing heavily on its Totaltech platform that provides around-the-clock support for 24 months after a product purchase.
McShane thinks that Best Buy is in a good position to maintain market share. Her price target of $83 is pretty close to where shares of the consumer electronics retailer are right now, but it's a big lift from her previous price goal of $59.
This is a far cry from where the analyst was just two weeks ago. McShane was concerned to find small crowds and heavy promotional activity at many of the brick-and-mortar chains she visited during the seasonally potent Black Friday weekend. She did single out Best Buy as one of the few physical stores that seemed to be holding up better than most retailers, but it wasn't enough to sway her from her bearish position and low price target at the time.
That restraint seemed fair then. Best Buy had just reported an 11% decline in revenue in its latest quarter. Net income took an even bigger hit. The results were still better than expected, positioning the company to be one of the better performers among a dicey lot of retail stocks. It's been 14 years since Best Buy delivered double-digit sales growth, but in this hazy climate, it's the relative victories that count.
