Morgan Stanley Raises Nutanix (NASDAQ:NTNX) Price Target to $78.00

Nutanix (NASDAQ:NTNX) had its target price hoisted by 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.

A number of other research firms also recently issued reports on NTNX. Oppenheimer started coverage on shares of Nutanix in a research note on Wednesday, November 13th. They issued an “outperform” rating and a $80.00 price target on the stock. Barclays boosted their target price on Nutanix from $75.00 to $87.00 and gave the company an “overweight” rating in a research report on Wednesday. Needham & Company LLC lifted their price objective on Nutanix from $80.00 to $90.00 and gave the company a “buy” rating in a research note on Wednesday. JPMorgan Chase & Co. increased their target price on Nutanix from $65.00 to $75.00 and gave the stock an “overweight” rating in a research note on Thursday, August 29th. Finally, Royal Bank of Canada raised their target price on Nutanix from $70.00 to $75.00 and gave the company an “outperform” rating in a report on Thursday, August 29th. Three analysts have rated the stock with a hold rating, thirteen have given a buy rating and one has issued a strong buy rating to the stock. According to data from MarketBeat, Nutanix has a consensus rating of “Moderate Buy” and an average target price of $78.86.

Nutanix Stock Down 2.1 %

NTNX stock opened at $65.28 on Wednesday. Nutanix has a 52-week low of $42.22 and a 52-week high of $75.80. The business has a fifty day moving average of $64.88 and a two-hundred day moving average of $59.45. The stock has a market cap of $17.31 billion, a price-to-earnings ratio of -186.51, a price-to-earnings-growth ratio of 11.04 and a beta of 1.17.

Nutanix (NASDAQ:NTNX) last issued its quarterly earnings data on Wednesday, August 28th. The technology company reported ($0.06) earnings per share (EPS) for the quarter, beating the consensus estimate of ($0.08) by $0.02. Nutanix had a negative net margin of 3.54% and a negative return on equity of 12.43%. The firm had revenue of $547.95 million for the quarter, compared to analyst estimates of $537.12 million. As a group, sell-side analysts anticipate that Nutanix will post 0.31 EPS for the current year.

Insiders Place Their Bets

In other Nutanix news, CFO Rukmini Sivaraman sold 24,316 shares of Nutanix stock in a transaction dated Tuesday, September 17th. The stock was sold at an average price of $58.85, for a total transaction of $1,430,996.60. Following the completion of the sale, the chief financial officer now directly owns 192,169 shares of the company’s stock, valued at $11,309,145.65. The trade was a 11.23 % decrease in their position. The sale was disclosed in a filing with the Securities & Exchange Commission, which is available at this link. Also, COO David Sangster sold 11,950 shares of the company’s stock in a transaction dated Monday, September 16th. The stock was sold at an average price of $59.83, for a total value of $714,968.50. Following the transaction, the chief operating officer now directly owns 123,868 shares of the company’s stock, valued at approximately $7,411,022.44. This represents a 8.80 % 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 Trading of Nutanix

A number of hedge funds and other institutional investors have recently added to or reduced their stakes in the stock. Cetera Investment Advisers boosted its holdings in shares of Nutanix by 48.7% in the 1st quarter. Cetera Investment Advisers now owns 76,103 shares of the technology company’s stock valued at $4,697,000 after buying an additional 24,918 shares in the last quarter. Diversified Trust Co boosted its stake in Nutanix by 46.7% in the second quarter. Diversified Trust Co now owns 36,666 shares of the technology company’s stock valued at $2,084,000 after acquiring an additional 11,668 shares in the last quarter. Versor Investments LP boosted its stake in Nutanix by 211.7% in the third quarter. Versor Investments LP now owns 33,352 shares of the technology company’s stock valued at $1,976,000 after acquiring an additional 22,652 shares in the last quarter. Marshall Wace LLP grew its holdings in shares of Nutanix by 47.5% during the second quarter. Marshall Wace LLP now owns 1,482,989 shares of the technology company’s stock worth $84,308,000 after purchasing an additional 477,838 shares during the last quarter. Finally, Resolute Capital Asset Partners LLC acquired a new stake in shares of Nutanix during the second quarter worth about $2,274,000. Institutional investors and hedge funds own 85.25% of the company’s stock.

Nutanix Company Profile

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.