Investing

10 Speculative Analyst Stocks With Huge Potential Upside

Jon C. Ogg

Published: October 21, 2017 9:15 am

Last Updated: January 12, 2020 6:57 am

The Dow blew through 23,000 for the first time during the week of October 20, 2017, and it was coincidentally 30 years to the day after the 1987 stock market crash. Stronger post-hurricane economic numbers, stronger earnings, a likely budget passage and probable tax cuts were all driving forces this past week. With the bull market over eight and a half years old, some investors might be thinking it’s time to bail or that the elusive huge correction may come up. Other investors continue to search for new ideas to generate gains and income ahead, since the market keeps finding new reasons to buy stocks after every major sell-off.

24/7 Wall St. reviews dozens of analyst research reports each day of the week. Our goal is to find some of those new investing and trading ideas for our readers. Some of the top analyst reports covering stocks to buy come with way above-average upside projections. In some cases these upside targets are for 35%, 50% or even over 100% higher to the listed price targets. During the week of October 20, we tracked more than 10 highly speculative analyst calls for investors who do not shy away from risk.

Consensus analyst price target data and valuation metrics are from the Thomson Reuters sell-side research service. Additional color has been included on each analyst call so investors don’t blindly chase these analyst calls without doing further research. After all, 24/7 Wall St.  wouldn’t want readers thinking we believe in all the analyst calls just because they were printed.

It is important to realize that traditional Buy and Outperform analyst calls from the large bulge bracket firms (Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Merrill Lynch, Citigroup and the like) generally come with upside of about 8% to 10% for Dow and S&P 500 stocks. Sometimes those big stocks are given 15% upside at the larger firms. That means that projected price targets with upside of 35%, 50% or over 100% are likely far more risky than your traditional stocks.

By the nature of these speculative companies being in biotech, tech, metals, and energy, as well as being small cap stocks, they are already more risky than most investors should probably consider. None of these companies would come anywhere close to passing suitability tests for widows and orphans.

We have seen some efforts to show baskets created around these picks in the past. The good news is that one of the baskets was recently up about 40% since the start of summer on last look. The bad news is that there are many big losers stacked in with the big winners — a hallmark of highly speculative stocks. Investors need to treat any speculative analyst call with at least some caution, and these should only be used as a starting point or a supplement to more in-depth research efforts before deciding to buy or sell any of these stocks.

Here are 10 highly speculative analyst calls made by various Wall Street and boutique firm analysts with huge upside projections made during the week of October 20, 2017.

Carbonite Inc. (NASDAQ: CARB) was started as Market Outperform with a $30 price target at JMP Securities on October 17. This compares with a $22.30 prior closing price, and note that Carbonite was trading at just $22.70 on Friday’s close. The stock has a 52-week trading range of $14.10 to $24.60, and it had a consensus analyst target price of $26.57. JMP sees Carbonite being a disruptor in the small and mid-sized business market for data backup and protection, and the firm even noted that it is valued at a discount to peers.

Eiger BioPharmaceuticals Inc. (NASDAQ: EIGR) was started as Buy and assigned a $35 price target at Roth Capital on October 19. The prior closing price was $11.65. Shares were up 1.7% at $11.85 on Thursday morning and trading at $12.80 on Friday’s close. The 52-week range is $6.10 to $14.75, and this actually was not outlandish compared with other aggressive analyst calls in this highly speculative stock. Just be advised that there appears to be pending drug study data set for presentation in the coming days (subject to change), and that means that things could be the same, far better or far worse after that is presented. Eiger’s stock price also has almost doubled since the first time we covered it among highly speculative analyst picks earlier this year.

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GoPro Inc. (NASDAQ: GPRO) may be worth over $1 billion, but it is still highly speculative and in a niche business. Longbow Research raised the stock to Buy from Neutral on October 18, after the company sent out new product updates earlier in the week. Its shares had closed up 1.65% at $9.23 on Tuesday ahead of the call and were indicated to open up 4% at $9.60 on Wednesday. That being said, GoPro was only at $9.48 by week’s end. It has a 52-week range of $7.14 to $15.12, and its consensus target price was $9.89 ahead of the call but had moved up to $10.56 by the end of Friday’s session.

Halcon Resources Corp. (NYSE: HK) received two positive analyst calls this past week. Seaport Global Securities raised it to Buy from Neutral with an $8 price target (versus a $5.90 prior close) on October 17. Then it was raised to Buy from Accumulate at Johnson Rice on October 19. Halcon shares were last seen at $6.39, but headlines showed that shares had backed off their highs after an insider sold 1.65 million shares.

Lattice Semiconductor Corp. (NASDAQ: LSCC) was raised to Buy from Hold and the price target was raised to $7.00 from $6.50 at Jefferies on Wednesday. It should be noted that this call was against a $5.50 prior closing price, but shares were at $5.79 as trading ended on Friday. This was also a down-beaten name earlier in the year after its acquisition from China was blocked by CFIUS. Lattice Semiconductor has a 52-week range of $5.05 to $7.99.

Northern Dynasty Minerals Ltd. (NYSEAMERICAN: NAK) is about as speculative and controversial as you can get in gold and minerals stocks. It is a huge battleground stock, and most analysts would not dare touch this one. But it was started with a Buy rating and assigned a $2.50 price target at H.C. Wainwright (versus a $2.09 prior close) earlier in the week. The stock barely went up, and it was actually trading at $2.05 on last check. Its 52-week range is $0.67 to $3.45, and it is very thinly covered by analysts.

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Oasis Petroleum Inc. (NYSE: OAS) was started as Overweight and assigned a $14.00 price target at Piper Jaffray on October 17, and the prior closing price was $8.67. Oasis shares were just at $8.71 on Friday’s close. The consensus target price is $12.52, and the 52-week range is $6.69 to $17.08. In an effort to show some caution: two other analyst calls stood out here. Goldman Sachs raised its rating to Neutral from Sell and Morgan Stanley maintained an Equal Weight rating and cut its target to $9 from $10 later in the week.

Stratasys Ltd. (NASDAQ: SSYS) may be a $1.2 billion company now, but it is in the 3D printing group of stocks that has gone from boom to bust for many fad-to-bubble investors. Susquehanna raised it to Positive from Neutral with a $31 price target on Friday. This was versus a prior closing price of $20.95, but the shares were up 10.8% on the day to $23.21 on Friday. Details of the call were not seen. Stratasys has a 52-week range of $16.37 to $30.88, and it had a consensus target price of $25.79. It still supposedly has a $39 street-high analyst target price, and the lowest analyst price target is $20.

Zynga Inc. (NASDAQ: ZNGA) was reiterated as Outperform with a $4.65 price target at Wedbush Securities on October 18. This call compared with a $3.84 prior closing price, and Zynga’s stock was only at $3.94 by Friday’s close. The firm noted strong revenues from CSR and Poker but wonders about the pipeline and thinks it may need a new hit to before the share price can rise meaningfully. That almost sounded more cautious than robust, and Zynga’s consensus target price is only $4.24. Its 52-week range is $2.40 to $4.02.

And beyond speculative is Immuron Ltd. (NASDAQ: IMRN). This tiny micro(scopic)-cap foreign stock has a market value of less than $20 million, so we wouldn’t normally cover this. H.C. Wainwright started the Australian biotech at Buy with a $15 price target on October 18. The prior close was $5.03 per American depositary share, and the stock traded at $5.25 by week’s end. The 52-week range is $4.47 to $10.00, and this outfit targets treatments for various gut medicated diseases. Be advised that 24/7 Wall St. had never heard of Immuron prior to this call.

24/7 Wall St. tracked an unusual exchange traded fund (ETF) launch this week. It was speculative in the sense that it is an artificial intelligence-powered stock-picking ETF using IBM’s Watson for its analysis and research. This ETF is called the AI Powered Equity ETF (NYSEMKT: AIEQ), and it joins BUZZ US Sentiment Leaders ETF (NYSEMKT: BUZ) in the AI theme for ETFs.

We have not yet adopted our year-forward analyst target views for any formal DJIA price targets in 2018. That still feels too soon considering earnings season isn’t over and considering that the holiday season and year-end changes have not been seen. Still, our first look at the data using the same methodology at the start of 2017 and prior years suggests that the Dow could be headed north of 25,000 a year from now.