With a sudden -1.3% drop to $286.14, Microsoft has Wall Street wondering if its shares will keep moving past its target price of $294.59. With an average rating of buy, and analysts assigning target prices from 212.0 to 400.0 dollars per share, investors will be betting heavily on the Software stock's next move.
The market seems to share this optimistic view, since Microsoft has a short interest of only 0.5% (this is the percentage of the share float that is being shorted). Each short position represents an investor's expectation that the price of the stock will decrease in the future.
Short selling involves borrowing shares and then selling them at current market prices. In the successful version of the strategy, the shares are purchased at a lower price at some time in the future. The investor then returns the shares to the lender, and keeps the profit made on the sell/buy transaction.
Another way to gauge the sentiment on Microsoft is to look at the percentage of institutions that are invested in the stock. In this case, 73.7% of the shares are held by pension, mutual, and hedge funds, which shows that these institutions probably have strong confidence in the stock.
If institutions are invested in a particular stock, it shows in most cases that they have performed quality research and concluded that it is a good investment. In some cases, however, increases in institutional ownership could be a sign of a takeover attempt or proxy fight, which can actually injure share prices. Also, institutions are not infallible, and can certainly make miscalculations -- often with spectacular results.
To sum up, Microsoft is probably the subject of mixed market sentiment because of an analyst consensus of some upside potential, a buy rating, a very low short interest, and an average number of institutional investors. At Market Inference, we believe that any investment decision should be preceded by an in-depth analysis of the company's fundamental values and a comparison with similar stocks.
Here's a snapshot of some important facts to keep in mind about MSFT:
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The stock has trailing 12 month earnings per share (EPS) of $8.9
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Microsoft has a trailing 12 month Price to Earnings (P/E) ratio of 32.2 compared to the S&P 500 average of 15.97
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The company has a Price to Book (P/B) ratio of 11.6 in contrast to the S&P 500's average ratio of 2.95
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Microsoft is a Technology company, and the sector average P/E and P/B ratios are 27.16 and 6.23 respectively
