Salesforce Sees Unusually High Options Volume (NYSE:CRM)

Salesforce Inc. (NYSE:CRM) was the target of unusually large options trading on Wednesday. Stock investors acquired 253,387 call options on the stock. This represents an increase of 171% compared to the typical daily volume of 93,447 call options.

Insider Activity

In other Salesforce news, Director Craig Conway sold 4,500 shares of the company’s stock in a transaction on Friday, September 4th. The stock was sold at an average price of $260.61, for a total value of $1,172,745.00. Following the completion of the sale, the director directly owned 5,437 shares in the company, valued at $1,416,936.57. This represents a 45.29% decrease in their position. The sale was disclosed in a filing with the Securities & Exchange Commission, which is available through the SEC website. 3.50% of the stock is owned by company insiders.

Institutional Inflows and Outflows

Several institutional investors and hedge funds have recently added to or reduced their stakes in CRM. Anchor Investment Management LLC increased its position in shares of Salesforce by 184.5% in the 2nd quarter. Anchor Investment Management LLC now owns 17,983 shares of the CRM provider’s stock valued at $2,817,000 after purchasing an additional 11,663 shares during the last quarter. Marathon Wealth Advisors LLC lifted its position in shares of Salesforce by 1.2% during the 2nd quarter. Marathon Wealth Advisors LLC now owns 21,267 shares of the CRM provider’s stock worth $3,332,000 after purchasing an additional 260 shares during the last quarter. ABS Direct Equity Fund LLC purchased a new stake in shares of Salesforce during the 2nd quarter worth $25,000. Van Hulzen Asset Management LLC grew its stake in shares of Salesforce by 73.0% during the second quarter. Van Hulzen Asset Management LLC now owns 2,136 shares of the CRM provider’s stock worth $335,000 after purchasing an additional 901 shares in the last quarter. Finally, MCF Advisors LLC grew its stake in shares of Salesforce by 35.4% during the second quarter. MCF Advisors LLC now owns 3,486 shares of the CRM provider’s stock worth $547,000 after purchasing an additional 912 shares in the last quarter. Institutional investors and hedge funds own 80.43% of the company’s stock.

More Salesforce News

Here are the key news stories impacting Salesforce this week:

• Positive Sentiment: Analyst upgrade: Mizuho raised its price target from $265 to $280 and assigned an “outperform” rating, citing a more favorable 2026 setup following Dreamforce. Salesforce gets fresh target hike from Mizuho after Dreamforce
• Positive Sentiment: AI product momentum: Salesforce unveiled Koa, a CRM reasoning model developed with NVIDIA and built on NVIDIA Nemotron, to support complex Agentforce workflows. The company also introduced AIforce and announced expanded partnerships with OpenAI, AWS, Siemens and other vendors. These initiatives could improve AI adoption and strengthen Salesforce’s enterprise distribution advantage. Announcing Koa
• Positive Sentiment: Buyback support: Jim Cramer said Salesforce’s $25 billion share-repurchase program is looking increasingly attractive and argued that the issues weighing on investor sentiment have largely passed. Salesforce’s $25 Billion Buyback
• Positive Sentiment: Usage growth: Slackbot users reportedly rose more than 150% sequentially, suggesting growing customer engagement with Salesforce’s AI tools and potential support for future bookings. Slackbot Users Jump 150%
• Neutral Sentiment: Salesforce’s strong recent earnings, including better-than-expected profit and roughly 11% year-over-year revenue growth, provide financial support, but investors remain focused on whether AI products can accelerate growth and cash flow.
• Negative Sentiment: Service disruption: A widespread outage caused severe delays, intermittent errors or inability to access parts of Salesforce’s cloud suite during Dreamforce. The timing raises concerns about platform reliability, customer satisfaction and execution, making it the clearest immediate pressure on CRM shares. Salesforce Service Outages Strike on Day 2 of Dreamforce
• Negative Sentiment: Some analysts question whether Salesforce’s elevated valuation is justified while free-cash-flow growth slows and most sales and service customers have not yet upgraded to premium AI-enabled editions.

Salesforce Stock Down 2.0%

NYSE:CRM traded down $5.01 during midday trading on Wednesday, reaching $250.64. The company had a trading volume of 9,302,866 shares, compared to its average volume of 13,999,823. Salesforce has a 12-month low of $146.32 and a 12-month high of $269.11. The firm has a market capitalization of $206.27 billion, a price-to-earnings ratio of 22.85, a PEG ratio of 1.18 and a beta of 1.20. The company has a current ratio of 0.84, a quick ratio of 0.84 and a debt-to-equity ratio of 1.02. The stock’s fifty day simple moving average is $204.13 and its 200-day simple moving average is $188.20.

Salesforce (NYSE:CRM) last issued its quarterly earnings results on Wednesday, August 26th. The CRM provider reported $5.90 earnings per share for the quarter, topping the consensus estimate of $3.27 by $2.63. The company had revenue of $11.35 billion for the quarter, compared to the consensus estimate of $11.33 billion. Salesforce had a return on equity of 24.90% and a net margin of 21.99%.Salesforce’s revenue was up 10.8% on a year-over-year basis. During the same quarter in the prior year, the business earned $2.91 EPS. Salesforce has set its FY 2027 guidance at 16.670-16.710 EPS and its Q3 2027 guidance at 3.420-3.440 EPS. On average, sell-side analysts anticipate that Salesforce will post 12.83 earnings per share for the current fiscal year.

Salesforce Dividend Announcement

The company also recently announced a quarterly dividend, which will be paid on Thursday, October 8th. Investors of record on Thursday, September 17th will be issued a $0.44 dividend. The ex-dividend date of this dividend is Thursday, September 17th. This represents a $1.76 annualized dividend and a yield of 0.7%. Salesforce’s dividend payout ratio (DPR) is 16.04%.

Wall Street Analysts Forecast Growth

A number of equities analysts recently weighed in on the stock. Monness Crespi & Hardt increased their price objective on shares of Salesforce from $222.00 to $266.00 and gave the stock a “buy” rating in a research report on Thursday, August 27th. BMO Capital Markets upped their price target on Salesforce from $230.00 to $260.00 and gave the stock an “outperform” rating in a research note on Thursday, August 27th. Truist Financial restated a “buy” rating and set a $300.00 price target (up from $280.00) on shares of Salesforce in a research report on Thursday, August 27th. Citigroup boosted their price objective on Salesforce from $204.00 to $233.00 and gave the company a “neutral” rating in a report on Thursday, August 27th. Finally, Daiwa Securities Group lowered their target price on Salesforce from $295.00 to $280.00 and set a “buy” rating for the company in a report on Tuesday, June 2nd. Three research analysts have rated the stock with a Strong Buy rating, twenty-eight have issued a Buy rating, fourteen have given a Hold rating and three have assigned a Sell rating to the stock. Based on data from MarketBeat.com, Salesforce presently has a consensus rating of “Moderate Buy” and an average target price of $267.50.

About Salesforce

Salesforce, Inc is a cloud-based software company that provides customer relationship management (CRM) technology and related enterprise applications. Its platform helps organizations manage sales, customer service, marketing, commerce, data analytics and business operations through subscription-based software and cloud services.

The company’s product portfolio includes Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud, Commerce Cloud, Data Cloud and the Salesforce Platform. Salesforce also offers Slack for workplace collaboration, Tableau for data visualization and analytics, MuleSoft for application integration, and artificial intelligence capabilities, including its Agentforce platform for building and deploying AI agents.

Founded in 1999, Salesforce is headquartered in San Francisco, California, and serves businesses and organizations across a broad range of industries and geographic markets worldwide.