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 EMC Corporation (EMC) gained slightly Thursday morning after Deutsche Bank initiated coverage on the data storage giant with a buy rating.
So what: Along with the bullish call, analyst Sherri Scribner planted a price target of $32 on the stock, representing about 17% worth of upside to yesterday's close. So, while contrarians might be turned off by EMC's price strength over the past couple of months, Scribner's call could reflect a growing sense on Wall Street that its growth prospects still aren't fully reflected in the valuation.
Now what: According to Deutsche, EMC's risk/reward trade-off is rather attractive at this point. "EMC continues to outgrow the overall storage market and take share," said Scribner. "In addition, the company is well positioned in key growth areas, including Software Defined Storage (ViPR and Project Nile), converged infrastructure (Vblocks) and Big Data (Pivotal platform). EMC remains one of the few names in IT hardware that is seeing above-market growth, and we expect this to continue."
When you couple those tailwinds with EMC's still-cheapish forward P/E of 12, it's tough to disagree with Deutsche's bullishness.
