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

Nutanix (NASDAQ:NTNX) had its price target upped by research analysts at Morgan Stanley from $72.00 to $78.00 in a research report issued to clients and investors on Wednesday,Benzinga reports. The brokerage currently has an “overweight” rating on the technology company’s stock. Morgan Stanley’s price objective indicates a potential upside of 16.94% from the stock’s previous close.

A number of other equities research analysts have also weighed in on NTNX. Raymond James lifted their price objective on Nutanix from $76.00 to $85.00 and gave the stock an “outperform” rating in a research report on Thursday, August 29th. Bank of America lifted their price target on shares of Nutanix from $72.00 to $75.00 and gave the company a “buy” rating in a report on Thursday, August 29th. Northland Securities restated a “market perform” rating and issued a $77.00 price objective (up from $74.00) on shares of Nutanix in a report on Wednesday. Needham & Company LLC lifted their target price on shares of Nutanix from $80.00 to $90.00 and gave the company a “buy” rating in a research note on Wednesday. Finally, Royal Bank of Canada increased their price target on shares of Nutanix from $70.00 to $75.00 and gave the stock an “outperform” rating in a research note on Thursday, August 29th. Three equities research analysts have rated the stock with a hold rating, thirteen have issued a buy rating and one has assigned a strong buy rating to the stock. Based on data from MarketBeat, the stock currently has an average rating of “Moderate Buy” and a consensus target price of $78.86.

Nutanix Stock Down 7.8 %

Shares of Nutanix stock opened at $66.70 on Wednesday. The company’s fifty day simple moving average is $64.79 and its two-hundred day simple moving average is $59.45. Nutanix has a 12-month low of $40.44 and a 12-month high of $75.80. The firm has a market cap of $17.69 billion, a PE ratio of -128.27, a price-to-earnings-growth ratio of 12.05 and a beta of 1.17.

Nutanix (NASDAQ:NTNX) last posted its earnings results on Wednesday, August 28th. The technology company reported ($0.06) earnings per share (EPS) for the quarter, topping the consensus estimate of ($0.08) by $0.02. The company had revenue of $547.95 million for the quarter, compared to analysts’ expectations of $537.12 million. Nutanix had a negative return on equity of 7.57% and a negative net margin of 5.81%. As a group, sell-side analysts expect that Nutanix will post 0.31 earnings per share for the current fiscal year.

Insider Activity

In other news, CFO Rukmini Sivaraman sold 24,316 shares of Nutanix stock in a transaction that occurred on Tuesday, September 17th. The shares were sold at an average price of $58.85, for a total value of $1,430,996.60. Following the completion of the sale, the chief financial officer now directly owns 192,169 shares in the company, valued at $11,309,145.65. The trade was a 11.23 % decrease in their ownership of the stock. The sale was disclosed in a legal filing with the SEC, which is available through this link. Also, COO David Sangster sold 11,950 shares of Nutanix stock in a transaction that occurred on Monday, September 16th. The stock was sold at an average price of $59.83, for a total transaction of $714,968.50. Following the completion of the sale, the chief operating officer now directly owns 123,868 shares of the company’s stock, valued at approximately $7,411,022.44. This trade represents a 8.80 % decrease in their position. The disclosure for this sale can be found here. Corporate insiders own 6.80% of the company’s stock.

Institutional Trading of Nutanix

A number of hedge funds have recently bought and sold shares of the company. Tidal Investments LLC raised its position in Nutanix by 4.0% in the third quarter. Tidal Investments LLC now owns 22,297 shares of the technology company’s stock worth $1,321,000 after acquiring an additional 862 shares during the period. Wilmington Savings Fund Society FSB purchased a new stake in shares of Nutanix in the 3rd quarter worth $111,000. Sanctuary Advisors LLC purchased a new stake in shares of Nutanix in the 3rd quarter worth $555,000. Geode Capital Management LLC raised its holdings in Nutanix by 0.5% in the 3rd quarter. Geode Capital Management LLC now owns 4,147,126 shares of the technology company’s stock worth $245,968,000 after purchasing an additional 22,091 shares during the period. Finally, Groupama Asset Managment lifted its position in Nutanix by 1.0% during the third quarter. Groupama Asset Managment now owns 707,000 shares of the technology company’s stock valued at $41,890,000 after purchasing an additional 7,000 shares in the last quarter. Hedge funds and other institutional investors 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.