Nutanix (NASDAQ:NTNX) Stock Price Expected to Rise, Morgan Stanley Analyst Says

Nutanix (NASDAQ:NTNX) had its target price lifted by stock analysts at Morgan Stanley from $72.00 to $78.00 in a report released on Wednesday,Benzinga reports. The firm currently has an “overweight” rating on the technology company’s stock. Morgan Stanley’s price objective indicates a potential upside of 11.83% from the stock’s previous close.

Other equities analysts have also recently issued reports about the stock. Bank of America lifted their price objective on shares of Nutanix from $72.00 to $75.00 and gave the stock a “buy” rating in a research note on Thursday, August 29th. Oppenheimer started coverage on Nutanix in a research report on Wednesday, November 13th. They issued an “outperform” rating and a $80.00 price target for the company. JPMorgan Chase & Co. raised their price objective on Nutanix from $65.00 to $75.00 and gave the company an “overweight” rating in a research note on Thursday, August 29th. Needham & Company LLC lifted their target price on Nutanix from $80.00 to $90.00 and gave the stock a “buy” rating in a report on Wednesday. Finally, Royal Bank of Canada increased their price target on Nutanix from $70.00 to $75.00 and gave the company an “outperform” rating in a report on Thursday, August 29th. Three equities research analysts have rated the stock with a hold rating and fourteen have assigned a buy rating to the company. According to data from MarketBeat.com, the stock presently has a consensus rating of “Moderate Buy” and a consensus target price of $76.50.

Nutanix Stock Performance

NASDAQ:NTNX traded down $2.60 during trading hours on Wednesday, reaching $69.75. The stock had a trading volume of 3,194,114 shares, compared to its average volume of 2,560,928. The stock has a market capitalization of $18.50 billion, a PE ratio of -134.13, a PEG ratio of 12.05 and a beta of 1.17. Nutanix has a 52 week low of $40.44 and a 52 week high of $75.80. The company has a 50 day moving average price of $64.45 and a two-hundred day moving average price of $59.35.

Nutanix (NASDAQ:NTNX) last announced its quarterly earnings results on Wednesday, August 28th. The technology company reported ($0.06) earnings per share for the quarter, topping the consensus estimate of ($0.08) by $0.02. The company had revenue of $547.95 million for the quarter, compared to analysts’ expectations of $537.12 million. Nutanix had a negative net margin of 5.81% and a negative return on equity of 7.57%. Equities research analysts predict that Nutanix will post 0.31 EPS for the current year.

Insiders Place Their Bets

In other news, COO David Sangster sold 11,950 shares of the company’s stock in a transaction that occurred on Monday, September 16th. The shares were sold at an average price of $59.83, for a total value of $714,968.50. Following the completion of the sale, the chief operating officer now owns 123,868 shares of the company’s stock, valued at approximately $7,411,022.44. This represents a 8.80 % decrease in their position. The sale was disclosed in a document filed with the Securities & Exchange Commission, which is accessible through this link. Also, CFO Rukmini Sivaraman sold 24,316 shares of the stock in a transaction that occurred on Tuesday, September 17th. The shares were sold at an average price of $58.85, for a total transaction of $1,430,996.60. Following the transaction, the chief financial officer now owns 192,169 shares in the company, valued at approximately $11,309,145.65. This represents a 11.23 % decrease in their ownership of the stock. The disclosure for this sale can be found here. 6.80% of the stock is currently owned by company insiders.

Institutional Inflows and Outflows

Institutional investors and hedge funds have recently modified their holdings of the company. Thurston Springer Miller Herd & Titak Inc. purchased a new position in Nutanix in the second quarter worth $25,000. ORG Wealth Partners LLC purchased a new stake in shares of Nutanix during the 3rd quarter valued at $27,000. Larson Financial Group LLC boosted its position in shares of Nutanix by 122.7% in the 3rd quarter. Larson Financial Group LLC now owns 510 shares of the technology company’s stock worth $30,000 after purchasing an additional 281 shares in the last quarter. Advisors Asset Management Inc. grew its stake in Nutanix by 150.7% during the 3rd quarter. Advisors Asset Management Inc. now owns 534 shares of the technology company’s stock worth $32,000 after buying an additional 321 shares during the last quarter. Finally, Itau Unibanco Holding S.A. acquired a new position in Nutanix during the 2nd quarter valued at about $32,000. Hedge funds and other institutional investors own 85.25% of the company’s stock.

About Nutanix

Nutanix, Inc provides an enterprise cloud platform in North America, Europe, the Asia Pacific, the Middle East, Latin America, and Africa. The company offers hyperconverged infrastructure software stack that converges virtualization, storage, and networking services into a turnkey solution; Acropolis Hypervisor, an enterprise-grade virtualization solution; flow virtual networking and flow network security, which offers services to visualize the network, automate common network operations, and build virtual private networks; Nutanix Kubernetes Engine for automated deployment and management of Kubernetes clusters to simplify the provisioning, operations, and lifecycle management of cloud-native environments, applications, and microservices; and Nutanix Cloud Clusters.