Rocketing to a price of $184.22 during today's afternoon trading session, shares of Zscaler are still -21.64% below their average target price of $235.1. Could there be more upside potential for the stock? Analysts are giving ZS an average rating of buy and target prices ranging from $180.0 to $400.0 dollars per share.
For the greater market's outlook on the stock, we can use Zscaler's short interest as a proxy. The short interest represents the proportion of the float's shares that are tied to short positions, meaning that the investor believes the stock will decline in the future. Here, the stock's short interest is 5.1% which means the outlook is split.
When a stock is sold short, it means an investor has borrowed shares of the stock from their broker, and then sold them at the going market price. The investor hopes for the price to decline, so that they might buy those shares back at a lower price in the future. Once they do, they can return the borrowed shares to their broker, and keep the profit they made on the transaction.
One way to get an idea of the market sentiment on a stock is to check its rate of institutional ownership. In the case of Zscaler, institutional investors own 51.2% of the shares. This would indicate a positive sentiment towards the stock among institutions. What does this really tell us?
Institutional investors such as hedge funds, investment firms, and wealth managers devote significant resources to identifying good investments. If they have decided to invest in ZS, it probably means they believe it is a solid investment choice. But it could also mean they are buying up shares in an effort to acquire the company or get seats on the board of directors. Also bear in mind that institutions are fallible (just maybe not quite as fallible as the average retail investor), so they may simply be wrong when they think they've found a good stock.
Overall, there is positive market sentiment on Zscaler because its an analyst consensus of strong upside potential, a buy rating, an average amount of shares sold short, and an average number of institutional investors. Warren Buffett famously said that in the short term, markets are voting mechanisms, but in the long term, they are weighing mechanisms. This means that long term investors should be aware of a stock's fundamentals before committing.
Buffett was one of the fist investors to focus on free cash flow as a yardstick for a company's health. Here are ZS's recent cash flows:
| Date Reported | Cash Flow from Operations ($ k) | Capital expenditures ($ k) | Free Cash Flow ($ k) | YoY Growth (%) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2023 | 462,343 | 97,197 | 365,146 | 44.55 |
| 2022 | 321,912 | 69,296 | 252,616 | 64.17 |
| 2021 | 202,040 | 48,165 | 153,875 | 324.54 |
| 2020 | 79,317 | 43,072 | 36,245 | 11.5 |
| 2019 | 58,027 | 25,520 | 32,507 | 731.38 |
| 2018 | 17,307 | 13,397 | 3,910 |
