Palo Alto Networks Inc. shares are basking in the ultimate relief rally Monday after the company’s Friday night earnings scare proved a fakeout. Shares of the cybersecurity company had sold off by 18% between when the company announced it would be reporting results on Friday night and when it actually delivered those results. While investors were fearing the worst given the strange timing, Palo Alto Networks’
PANW,
+14.84%
results and outlook ended up being fine.
Read: Palo Alto Networks CEO addresses Friday earnings experiment: ‘Lesson learnt’ The stock is ahead 15.7% in Monday morning action and on track for its largest single-day percentage gain in about two years as Wall Street unpacks the company’s new targets. “Overall the call reinforced our view that Palo Alto remains in a great position to consolidate enterprise security spend and in turn, remains a great way to invest in security at the platform level with expanding margins,” RBC Capital Markets analyst Matthew Hedberg wrote in a note to clients. He sees “upward bias” to Palo Alto Networks’ outlook for metrics like billing and free cash flow looking ahead to fiscal 2024 and fiscal 2026. He rates the stock at outperform and lifted his price target to $281 from $250. Wolfe Research’s Joshua Tilton commented that “the only real negative from the surprise [fourth-quarter] earnings event was indeed the Friday night timing.” He wrote: “At the end of the day, the timing of the event sent investor sentiment to an all-time tactical low heading into the print, yet results were better than feared and there was no catastrophic news. Our thesis that [Palo Alto] is the best brand in the security market with the most relevant products to sell into a large base of [chief information security officers] remains unchanged, we see room for upside to current [fiscal 2026] targets, and we are glad we kept our season tickets.” He noted that bears might pick at manage …
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PANW,
+14.84%
results and outlook ended up being fine.
Read: Palo Alto Networks CEO addresses Friday earnings experiment: ‘Lesson learnt’ The stock is ahead 15.7% in Monday morning action and on track for its largest single-day percentage gain in about two years as Wall Street unpacks the company’s new targets. “Overall the call reinforced our view that Palo Alto remains in a great position to consolidate enterprise security spend and in turn, remains a great way to invest in security at the platform level with expanding margins,” RBC Capital Markets analyst Matthew Hedberg wrote in a note to clients. He sees “upward bias” to Palo Alto Networks’ outlook for metrics like billing and free cash flow looking ahead to fiscal 2024 and fiscal 2026. He rates the stock at outperform and lifted his price target to $281 from $250. Wolfe Research’s Joshua Tilton commented that “the only real negative from the surprise [fourth-quarter] earnings event was indeed the Friday night timing.” He wrote: “At the end of the day, the timing of the event sent investor sentiment to an all-time tactical low heading into the print, yet results were better than feared and there was no catastrophic news. Our thesis that [Palo Alto] is the best brand in the security market with the most relevant products to sell into a large base of [chief information security officers] remains unchanged, we see room for upside to current [fiscal 2026] targets, and we are glad we kept our season tickets.” He noted that bears might pick at manage …nnDiscussion:nn” ai_name=”RocketNews AI: ” start_sentence=”Can I tell you more about this article?” text_input_placeholder=”Type ‘Yes'”]