Oppenheimer's Brian Schwartz sees more upside for Microsoft following record high
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Business Insider
22 minutes ago
- Business Insider
'…One of the Long-Term AI Winners in Software': Microsoft Stock (NASDAQ:MSFT) Notches Up With Oppenheimer Praise
Tech giant Microsoft (MSFT) just scored a serious win with praise from Oppenheimer, which revealed that there was plenty of opportunity for gains still to be claimed within Microsoft stock. Investors were, perhaps, a little skeptical of this, but sent shares up fractionally in Wednesday afternoon's trading. Don't Miss TipRanks' Half-Year Sale Take advantage of TipRanks Premium at 50% off! Unlock powerful investing tools, advanced data, and expert analyst insights to help you invest with confidence. Make smarter investment decisions with TipRanks' Smart Investor Picks, delivered to your inbox every week. The word came from Oppenheimer analyst Brian Schwartz, who has a five-star rating on TipRanks. Schwartz upgraded Microsoft from Perform to Outperform, and also set a $600 price target on Microsoft stock. That implied a roughly 21% upside potential against the closing price on Tuesday. The biggest reason for this is that Microsoft stands to gain substantially from artificial intelligence (AI) thanks to its current partnership with OpenAI, parent of ChatGPT. Microsoft also has its own AI system, Copilot, which should also help. But Schwartz notes that it is not just AI that will drive Microsoft forward. Its growth in Azure is also likely to remain strong, serving as a potent competitor to Amazon (AMZN) and its Amazon Web Services ecosystem. Moreover, Schwartz notes, the sheer power of Microsoft's growth in this sector is not yet fully reflected in the share price, so there is a substantial potential win afoot. Game Pass is Too Profitable! Yesterday, we had a report come in that noted that Microsoft's Game Pass was 'unsustainable.' Not everyone, however, agrees with that assessment. In fact, depending on how you look at the numbers—and what numbers you refuse to look at—Game Pass might actually be profitable. Reports noted that Microsoft has specifically said it does not factor in 'first-party sales cannibalization.' This means, essentially, that games made available on Game Pass are basically hurting game sales. Fewer people are opting to buy the games directly when they can simply play said games through Game Pass for the monthly subscription fee instead. Indeed, Microsoft noted that, for Doom: The Dark Ages, it reached the three million player mark fully seven times faster than Doom Eternal did. This suggests some cannibalization at work, as Doom: The Dark Ages ' numbers on Steam were less than inspiring. However, reports note that Microsoft has some noteworthy accounting tricks for how it factors in that cannibalization, which make Game Pass look better for Microsoft. Is Microsoft a Buy, Hold or Sell? Turning to Wall Street, analysts have a Strong Buy consensus rating on MSFT stock based on 31 Buys and three Holds assigned in the past three months, as indicated by the graphic below. After a 6.51% rally in its share price over the past year, the average MSFT price target of $527.37 per share implies 5.21% upside potential.
Business Insider
an hour ago
- Business Insider
OpenAI Hits Back at Competitors by Poaching Their Engineers
Microsoft-backed OpenAI (MSFT) has hired several top engineers from competing companies to join its scaling team, according to WIRED. This includes David Lau, who was previously Tesla's (TSLA) Vice President of Software Engineering. The news was shared in an internal Slack message by OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman, who leads the team. Lau will work alongside Uday Ruddarraju and Mike Dalton (both from Elon Musk's xAI), as well as Angela Fan, an AI researcher from Meta (META). Interestingly, Ruddarraju and Dalton helped build Colossus at xAI, which is a massive supercomputer that uses over 200,000 GPUs. Don't Miss TipRanks' Half-Year Sale Take advantage of TipRanks Premium at 50% off! Unlock powerful investing tools, advanced data, and expert analyst insights to help you invest with confidence. Make smarter investment decisions with TipRanks' Smart Investor Picks, delivered to your inbox every week. It is worth noting that OpenAI's scaling team is responsible for the hardware, software, and data centers that support the training of its AI models. That includes Stargate, which is a major new project focused on building AI infrastructure. Although this type of work isn't as well-known as products like ChatGPT, it plays a key role in OpenAI's mission to build powerful and safe AI. Unsurprisingly, the new hires said that they are excited to join the company, with Lau calling it the most meaningful work he could do, and Ruddarraju saying that Stargate is exactly the kind of challenge he enjoys. This hiring spree comes as competition for AI talent heats up. Indeed, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been aggressively poaching talent by offering generous pay and resources, which has led OpenAI to consider increasing its compensation to stay competitive. As companies compete to develop 'superintelligence,' they are being forced to spend significantly, change their hiring tactics, and explore new markets, such as education, where OpenAI and Microsoft plan to offer AI tools to teachers across the U.S. Is MSFT Stock a Buy? average MSFT price target of $527.37 per share implies 5% upside potential.
CNBC
an hour ago
- CNBC
CNBC Daily Open: AI is drawing investors' attention away from fresh tariffs
Just this morning Singapore time, U.S. President Donald Trump said that the 50% tariff on copper imports, which he announced earlier on Tuesday, will begin on Aug. 1. On Wednesday, Trump posted a fresh slate of tariff letters on goods from at least seven more countries, including Mexico, the no. 1 importer of goods to the U.S., Philippines, Brunei and Sri Lanka. But the president took a few steps further with Brazil by threatening a 50% tariff on the country. This is partly in response to the ongoing trial of his vocal ally Jair Bolsonaro over the role of Brazil's former president in an alleged coup to overturn his 2022 reelection loss. The 50% tariff on Brazil marks the largest duties rate that the White House has imposed on its trading partners in the recent round of new levies, which are set to begin on Aug. 1. But it appears that investors have decided to approach Trump's tariffs by not responding at all. They seem to have shifted their focus away from tariff developments and instead rekindled their appetite for artificial intelligence. On Wednesday, traders boosted shares of Nvidia, causing the company to be the first in the world to touch a market capitalization of $4 trillion. Other major tech names also rose, including Meta Platforms, Microsoft and Alphabet. New tariff developments. Trump revealed updated tariff rates on the Philippines, Brunei, Moldova, Algeria, Iraq, Libya and Sri Lanka, via screenshots on Truth Social. The 50% duty on copper imports is set to kick in on Aug. 1. U.S. stocks rise as investor appetite for AI rekindles. On Wednesday stateside, all three major U.S. benchmarks were up. The Nasdaq Composite advanced 0.94% to close at a new high of 20,611.34. Singapore stocks hit a new high for a fourth consecutive day amid mixed trading in Asia-Pacific markets Thursday. Bank of Korea keeps rates steady. The central bank stood pat on its policy rate at 2.5% Thursday as it assessed the impact of recent measures to cool the property market. Housing prices in Seoul spiked over 19% in June on an annualized basis, according to Goldman Sachs. Most Fed officials see rate cuts coming, but are split on how many. Officials saw tariff-induced inflation pressures as potentially "temporary and modest" while economic growth and hiring could weaken, minutes from the June 17-18 meeting released Wednesday showed. [PRO] Potential in UK stocks despite weak economy. An asset manager sees opportunities in the London market that are "hard to ignore," picking three stocks that he thinks are undervalued. Linda Yaccarino steps down as CEO of Elon Musk's X Linda Yaccarino on Wednesday announced she is stepping down as CEO of Elon Musk's social media site X after two years in the role. Her departure comes one day after Musk's artificial intelligence chatbot Grok repeatedly made antisemitic comments and referenced Hitler in response to posts about the Texas flooding. Yaccarino did not give a reason for her departure, but her exit had been in the works for more than a week, a person familiar with the matter told NBC News.
