How Wall Street Analysts View Symantec Stock

In this series, we’ve looked at Symantec’s (SYMC) fiscal 1Q18 results, recent acquisitions, and its position in the global software space. We also discussed Symantec’s stance in the competitive cybersecurity space, with its software blocking more than 1 billion attempted WannaCry attacks to date.

Cisco Systems (CSCO), Palo Alto Networks (PANW), Fortinet (FTNT), and FireEye (FEYE), the balance of the top five players in the security appliance spacem are also prominent players in the cybersecurity space.

Let’s take a look at some select market-centric views and metrics for Symantec. Of the 28 analyst recommendations for Symantec stock, there was only one “sell” recommendation on August 24, 2017. More than 50% of the recommendations were “hold,” and the rest were “buy.”

Symantec’s stock price movement during the past month has been largely negative. On August 24, 2017, despite beating analyst estimates on revenues and earnings, Symantec stock has fallen ~6%.

Wall Street’s consensus target price for Symantec was $32.96 per share on August 24, 2017. The company’s median target price was $33.00 on June 12, 2016. Symantec’s closing price was $29.22 on August 23, 2017.

Investors who want diversified exposure to Symantec can consider investing in the SPDR S&P 500 ETF (SPY). SPY has ~29% exposure to application software, and it invests ~0.3% of its holdings in Symantec.