Analyst Duel in Ancestry.com (ACOM)

Ancestry.com Inc. (NASDAQ: ACOM) is a company which many investors wonder how growth can be found, but that is not the opinion of all.  Wednesday brought two quite different research calls from Wall Street.

Goldman Sachs initiated coverage with a “Buy” rating and the firm’s price target objective was listed as $33.00 per share in the next year.  Morgan Stanley did not have a consensus price target that we saw but the rating was downgraded to Equal-Weight from Overweight this morning.

At $21.55, the 52-week trading range is $15.23 to $45.79 and the company’s market cap is still worth about $950 million.  Unfortunately for Ancestry.com, it is the analyst downgrade that is winning so far because the stock is down about 6.3%. Despite a large drop so far in 2011, this stock has still held up well from its IPO in late 2009 when shares briefly traded under $15.00.

What is also interesting about Ancestry.com is that it is not the sort of stock that has endless analyst coverage.  To have two calls in one day is no normal event, particularly when the opinions are this varied.  Of the nine analysts covering the company in the Thomson Reuters consensus universe,  the mean consensus price target objective is still above $37.00 but we would note that this target is likely not taking today’s research notes into consideration.