Friday's First Moves: AMD Price Target Hike, TWLO & NKE Downgrades

SPEAKER_1 (0:00)

We have a lot of movers to discuss, and for that, I'm joined by Dianne King Hall. Taking a look first up at AMD, we had Lisa Sue here this week, right? You walked her out there on the podium with Melania and the Women in Business panel that they had here. Let's talk about AMD.

Dianne King Hall (0:18)

It's been a busy week, and we cap it off with the fall star here, but things are off to the races this morning. We got AMD in focus, we've got a bullish call, a bullish reiteration, and a raising of the price target over Bank of America for AMD today. Those shares higher right now by nearly nine tenths of a percent there, gaining some ground in early action. BofA raising its price target to 720, that's up from 620 That implies more than 10 percent upside from yesterday's closing levels here. They've got a buy rating, they reiterate their buy rating on AMD. A good part of this is about this Anthropic, Akamai deal. Why does that matter for AMD?

That means they need more compute. BofA views the deal as evidence that the agentic AI error could drive demand for CPU heavy cloud infrastructure.

That obviously would benefit AMD with their strong footprint within CPU. In other words, basically rising AI or increasing AI workloads will expand the opportunity beyond just the GPU providers. So AMD, the investment case there or the investment thesis, I should say there from the view of Bank of America is that they will benefit from this move. So again, they're raising their price target. They also raised their earnings estimates for AMD by 2% for 2027 and 3% for 2028 It's a big week, as you mentioned, Nicole, for Alisa Su. She was here at the Stock Exchange drinking the opening bell earlier this week as a part of the group along with the First Lady, along with that state dinner last night with President Trump and China's President Xi Jinping. She was one of those top heads of corporations there alongside Jensen Wong of NVIDIA, Mark Zuckerberg, you name it, they were on the list there.

SPEAKER_1 (2:12)

Yeah, exciting dinner. 27 CEOs there last night. Let's get to Twilio. Twilio has a downgrade this morning, and let's see the stock's reaction to it, Dianne.

Dianne King Hall (2:21)

Yeah, so Twilio, this is HSBC who is making the call this morning. They are downgrading it to reduce from a hold. Twilio shares are down in response. Those shares off by more than 1% right now.

They are keeping their price target, but it's 211 So in other words, that signals more downside because we're closer to 300 than not on Twilio. They think that the investor expectations that are tied to Metis Muse agent and its relationship with Twilio have gone too far. And keep in mind Twilio is up more than 100% year to date on a year over year basis, even better almost 200% move there. Now there's been this bullish argument around Twilio that its AI agents will generate more phone calls, text messages and authentication requests. So Twilio, in other words, will benefit because they do the behind the scenes infrastructure here that lets companies, software platforms, move and communicate with customers. So it had a strong run on a year over year, year to date basis. HSBC essentially pushing back on that argument.

Yes, they think AI agents will boost communications traffic, but they question how much of that growth will come, in other words, from here for Twilio. So they think that while investors are treating Twilio as kind of a major infrastructure winner, especially with this latest leg from Metamuse, they think that more traffic doesn't necessarily mean better pricing. So not only are they, before they were whole, they were neutral, but now they're like, we're out.

SPEAKER_1 (4:02)

So different. I mean, we also heard from Rosenblatt this recent week, 275 target. They have a buy rating. The stock to 295 and hitting a new 52 week high.

So you really have this divergence. I mean, there is a valuation thought to when the stock crosses 300, reduces tough. Yeah, it is.

That's not just any sort of hold off. Let's talk about Nike. I did my subway survey today. There were more Nikes than other sneakers. I looked at for the On Cloud and Adidas and Puma. I like to do that survey on the subway to see what people are wearing. And Nike had the most. But let's talk about the stock.

Dianne King Hall (4:43)

Maybe you need to start your own Nicole Sentiment Survey when it comes to the athletic wear maker. So listen, Nike is getting another downgrade here. Those shares are lower by more than 1%, around 1.5% right now. Bank of America downgrading it to underperform from neutral. They've lowered their price target to 30 That's all the way down from 47 here. So signals more downside from even where we're sitting right now. They think that a meaningful sales recovery might not arrive until fiscal 2028 Keep in mind, shares of Nike had already been down more than 40% this year coming into today.