Jefferies Financial Group lowered its price objective on Robinhood Markets to $84 from $88 in a report released Monday, while keeping a buy rating on the stock. The new target still implies upside of 19.62% from the previous close.
Shares of Hood stock rose $1.32 on Monday to $70.22, leaving Robinhood with a market value of $63.22 billion. The move came after the stock had already swung between a 52-week low of $29.66 and a high of $153.86, and it also came as the latest round of Wall Street views kept the name firmly in the spotlight.
Robinhood now carries 18 buy ratings, six holds and one sell, according to the latest tally. That works out to a consensus rating of Moderate Buy, with an average price target of $117.42. Jefferies was not alone in revisiting the name this year. Loop Capital set a $130 target on Feb. 9, Piper Sandler cut its target to $135 from $155 on Feb. 11, Weiss Ratings restated a hold on March 27, Sanford C. Bernstein trimmed its target to $130 from $160 on March 30, and Zacks Research had already cut the shares from strong-buy to hold on Jan. 6.
The stock’s latest earnings report gave the bulls something to point to and the skeptics something else to weigh. On Feb. 10, Robinhood reported earnings of 66 cents a share, topping estimates of 63 cents, on revenue of $1.28 billion. Revenue rose 26.5% from a year earlier, when the company earned $1.01 a share. Analysts now forecast 1.35 EPS for the current fiscal year.
Yet one detail from the company’s recent trading history keeps the story from being entirely about analyst optimism. Insider Daniel Martin Gallagher, Jr. sold 10,000 shares on March 3 at an average price of $75.49, a $754,900 sale executed under a pre-arranged Rule 10b5-1 trading plan. After the transaction, he directly owned 452,849 shares valued at about $34.19 million, a 2.16% decrease in his position. For Robinhood, the message from Wall Street is mixed but not faint: the stock still has support, but the target prices are drifting lower even as the shares trade well below last year’s peak.
