Followinga recent slide for shares ofAdvanced Micro Devices,Bernstein analyst Stacy Rasgon has joined the bulls for the first time in about a decade.
Rasgon raised his rating on AMD stock (ticker: AMD) to Outperform from Market-Perform in a Tuesday research note. The analyst maintained a $150 target price, which represents a potential gain of 27% from recent levels.
“It has been almost 10 years since we held an Outperform rating on AMD’s stock, an omission mostly emotional in nature,” Rasgon wrote, referring to an unsuccessful bullish call on AMD earlier in his career as a chip analyst.
“This was a formative event in our analyst career, and the mental barriers to even contemplating a long call since then have been significant for us; much to our chagrin as watching AMD go from a sub-$2 stock to over $100 today takes the crown for the absolute biggest missed call in our entire Wall Street tenure.”
AMD stock has fallen about 20% in 2022 despitea strong fourth-quarter report earlier this year. It is still up 35% over the past 12 months.
This month, the firm closed its all-stock acquisition of its fellow semiconductor company Xilinx, which it announcedin October 2020.Concern that Xilinx holders might sell stock they received in the deal likely contributed to AMD’sworst trading day in years on Feb. 11.
“But time heals all wounds, and (as has frankly been abundantly clear for years) this is not the AMD of a decade ago,” Rasgon wrote. “And with the combination of continued stellar execution, increasingly bankable earnings power, and a recent sizeable pullback making valuation (dare we say?) downright attractive we are, for the first time in almost a decade, pulling the trigger.”
Rasgon thinks shares are increasingly attractive for investors who might have been inclined to sit on the fence, likely for too long, as he said he had.
The stock jumped 1.6% to $115.90 Tuesday, while theNasdaq Compositefell 1.2%.