Huge Analyst Upside Calls from This Past Week: SPDR, AMD, Alpha Natural, Newmont, Sprint

July 13, 2013 by Jon C. Ogg

Bull and BearThe stock market is hitting new highs again, and the fear of the Bernanke exit and tapering of quantitative easing is becoming less and less prevalent. 24/7 Wall St. looks at many research calls throughout each week, generally hundreds of calls. We track the top upgrades and downgrades from Wall Street and boutique research firms looking for the real research gems. These are the best analyst calls we have seen predicting big upside in stocks or the market in general for the past week.

The calls have one thing in common besides huge upside: they are all in names that investors should easily recognize. We often find many boutique calls in stocks that very few investors know of with upside of 50% to 100% or even more, but it really stands out when you see huge upside expected in what are considered household names to investors.

The first huge upside call is one that every stock market investor hopes come true (except for short sellers). It is a massive upside call for stocks in what would be a great secular bull market implied in the SPDR S&P 500 ETF Trust (NYSE: SPY). Jay Lefkowicz of Concept Capital in NYC is calling not just for the bull market to continue, and not just up to 2,000 nor 2,250, nor even just 2,500 on the S&P 500. His Fibonacci technical analysis upside target is now calling for over 50% upside, and that target price is 2,584 on the S&P 500 Index! (FULL DETAILS)

Advanced Micro Devices Inc. (NYSE: AMD) may have closed down on Friday, but the stock rose almost 12% on Thursday as the turnaround processor and graphics chipset maker saw two analyst upgrades simultaneously. Wells Fargo was the one who was first bullish earlier this year, and now we have seen big upside calls when BofA/Merrill Lynch and Canaccord Genuity both upgraded the stock to Buy. We provided full details in a dedicated piece. (FULL DETAILS)

Alpha Natural Resources Inc. (NYSE: ANR) is in the down and out coal sector. it is hard to find anything positive in coal, and it is hard to find anyone who is positive about the coal companies. Deutsche Bank upgraded Alpha Natural to Buy from Hold this last week and assigned a $7.50 price target for the stock. Alpha actually closed down on Friday and the $5.53 share price implies more than 35% upside in the call. After taking a look at the call, it turns out that Alpha trades at only about 30% of its tangible book value and about 22% of its stated book value. The stock is down almost half of its 52-week high and Alpha was literally a $40 stock just about two years ago.

Newmont Mining Corp. (NYSE: NEM) is also in the down and out gold sector, yet Sterne Agee’s Michael Dudas said that this has been sold off way too much. The firm reiterated a Buy rating and the price target is implied up at $48 as the firm expects that the average cost of production will be down to $725 per ounce of gold. With shares down under $27.50, even the consensus price target of $37.67 implies upside of almost 340% and Newmont’s dividend is now 5.2% since its share price has been cut in half. (FULL DETAILS)

Sprint Nextel Corp. (NYSE: S) is effectively now a tracking stock of Softbank in what we would call a Japanese-owned wireless carrier now. Early this last week came news that Cowen & Co. upgraded Sprint to Outperform from Market Perform and it assigned an $8.00 share price target for the stock. Based upon the sell-off that was seen, this now offers huge upside if Cowen is right for those investors who can filter past the noise while the investment community figures out that the float is really going to be about 30% of the combined NewCo. The implied upside here is now almost 25%, which is almost unheard of for a telecom giant. (FULL DETAILS)

You can track daily Wall Street research by following @JonOgg on Twitter.

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