Snowflake (NYSE:SNOW) Shares Up 3.7% – Should You Buy?

Snowflake Inc. (NYSE:SNOW)’s share price traded up 3.7% during mid-day trading on Monday . The stock traded as high as $227.40 and last traded at $224.6650. 4,978,214 shares were traded during mid-day trading, an increase of 18% from the average session volume of 4,220,951 shares. The stock had previously closed at $216.71.

Analyst Ratings Changes

A number of research firms have recently issued reports on SNOW. Wedbush restated an “outperform” rating and issued a $270.00 target price on shares of Snowflake in a report on Thursday, December 4th. Bank of America raised their price objective on shares of Snowflake from $280.00 to $310.00 and gave the company a “buy” rating in a research report on Monday, November 17th. KeyCorp increased their price target on shares of Snowflake from $275.00 to $285.00 and gave the stock an “overweight” rating in a research note on Thursday, December 4th. Scotiabank reissued an “outperform” rating on shares of Snowflake in a research note on Thursday, December 4th. Finally, Sanford C. Bernstein restated a “market perform” rating and issued a $237.00 price objective on shares of Snowflake in a research note on Thursday, December 4th. Two research analysts have rated the stock with a Strong Buy rating, thirty-five have assigned a Buy rating, three have given a Hold rating and three have assigned a Sell rating to the stock. According to data from MarketBeat.com, the stock presently has an average rating of “Moderate Buy” and an average target price of $275.32.

Snowflake Stock Performance

The firm has a market capitalization of $76.88 billion, a price-to-earnings ratio of -55.61 and a beta of 1.14. The firm’s 50-day moving average price is $243.00 and its two-hundred day moving average price is $228.78. The company has a debt-to-equity ratio of 1.07, a quick ratio of 1.37 and a current ratio of 1.37.

Snowflake (NYSE:SNOW) last released its quarterly earnings data on Wednesday, December 3rd. The company reported $0.35 earnings per share for the quarter, beating the consensus estimate of $0.31 by $0.04. The company had revenue of $1.21 billion for the quarter, compared to analyst estimates of $1.18 billion. Snowflake had a negative return on equity of 45.91% and a negative net margin of 30.76%.The company’s revenue was up 28.7% compared to the same quarter last year. During the same period in the prior year, the company posted $0.20 EPS. Sell-side analysts predict that Snowflake Inc. will post -2.36 earnings per share for the current year.

Insider Activity

In other news, Director Michael L. Speiser sold 50,338 shares of Snowflake stock in a transaction that occurred on Friday, December 5th. The shares were sold at an average price of $230.65, for a total value of $11,610,459.70. Following the completion of the transaction, the director owned 32,756 shares in the company, valued at approximately $7,555,171.40. The trade was a 60.58% decrease in their ownership of the stock. The transaction was disclosed in a legal filing with the SEC, which is accessible through this link. Also, CAO Emily Ho sold 1,072 shares of Snowflake stock in a transaction on Tuesday, December 23rd. The shares were sold at an average price of $223.63, for a total value of $239,731.36. Following the completion of the transaction, the chief accounting officer owned 43,809 shares of the company’s stock, valued at approximately $9,797,006.67. The trade was a 2.39% decrease in their position. The SEC filing for this sale provides additional information. Insiders have sold a total of 351,139 shares of company stock worth $81,300,853 over the last 90 days. 6.80% of the stock is currently owned by company insiders.

Institutional Inflows and Outflows

A number of institutional investors have recently made changes to their positions in SNOW. Kingstone Capital Partners Texas LLC acquired a new position in Snowflake in the second quarter valued at about $3,900,134,000. Norges Bank acquired a new stake in Snowflake in the 2nd quarter valued at $944,895,000. Winslow Capital Management LLC bought a new stake in Snowflake during the 2nd quarter worth about $725,667,000. Coatue Management LLC bought a new position in shares of Snowflake in the 3rd quarter valued at about $441,277,000. Finally, American Century Companies Inc. raised its holdings in Snowflake by 233.3% during the third quarter. American Century Companies Inc. now owns 2,104,925 shares of the company’s stock worth $474,766,000 after acquiring an additional 1,473,354 shares in the last quarter. 65.10% of the stock is owned by institutional investors.

About Snowflake

Snowflake Inc is a cloud-native data platform company that provides a suite of services for storing, processing and analyzing large volumes of data. Its core offering, often described as the Snowflake Data Cloud, combines data warehousing, data lake and data sharing capabilities in a single managed service delivered across major public cloud providers. The platform is designed to support analytics, data engineering, data science and application workloads with a focus on scalability, concurrency and simplified administration.

Key products and capabilities include a multi-cluster, shared-data architecture that separates compute from storage; continuous data ingestion and streaming; support for structured and semi-structured data formats; tools for data governance, security and compliance; and developer frameworks for building data applications.