A selection of food that is on the menu at the Jack in the Box on Campus Drive in Irvine, Calif.
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First-quarter earnings season is well underway, with several tech heavyweights reporting their financial results for the most recent quarter this past week.
There’s more to come, though. Plenty of companies are preparing to release their quarterly numbers. Ahead of these upcoming earnings releases, Wall Street analysts are taking stock of the names they cover, highlighting plays that appear compelling.
The buy-rated stocks mentioned below have been deemed just that, by analysts with a proven track record of success. TipRanks’ analyst forecasting service attempts to pinpoint the best-performing Wall Street analysts.
These analysts have achieved the highest average return per rating as well as success rate, taking the number of ratings made by each analyst into consideration.
Here are the best-performing analysts’ top stock picks right now:
Global Payments
Ahead of its first quarter earnings release on May 4, Deutsche Bank analyst Bryan Keane remains optimistic about Global Payment’s long-term growth prospects. With this in mind, the five-star analyst reiterated a buy rating on April 26. Reflecting an additional bullish signal, he bumped up the price target to $235 (8% upside potential).
It should be noted that due to “conservatism in Merchant,” Keane trimmed his first-quarter estimates, with the analyst now calling for revenue of $1.754 billion and EPS of $1.76.
That said, he left his forecasts for full year 2021 as is. For the full year, revenue growth is expected to land at roughly 12% on a constant currency basis, and upside could possibly come from improving spend and easy comps during the year.
“With 60%-plus of the business coming from tech enablement, we expect GPN to benefit from improving volumes and trends in the integrated and vertical markets businesses as well as continued strength in eComm/omni-channel, which accounts for ~25% of total revenue. GPN should also benefit from new wins and partnerships ramping up such as Truist and AWS/GOOG as well as strong revenue synergies across the businesses,” Keane explained.
On top of this, the company’s guidance doesn’t account for any benefit from the most recent stimulus package, “which could drive upside along with accelerated repurchases and potential for accretive acquisitions,” in Keane’s opinion.
Delivering a stellar 78% success rate and 24.8% average return per rating, Keane is ranked #182 out of over 7,000 financial analysts tracked by TipRanks.
Lyft
Lyft announced on April 26 that like its peer Uber, it is leaving its self-driving car unit, Level 5, in the rear-view mirror, selling it for $550 million to a subsidiary of Toyota.
For BTIG’s Jake Fuller, this deal is a major positive for the ridesharing company. As such, the top analyst maintained a Buy rating…
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