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Top Analyst Upgrades and Downgrades: AbbVie, Frontier Communications, Hyatt Hotels, Weatherford International and Many More

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Stocks were indicated to open marginally lower on Tuesday. Now that the bull market is officially eight years old, 24/7 Wall St. took a look at the then versus now headlines with a view of how things look now. Investors have bought after every single sell-off for over five years now. Those same investors are also looking for new ideas and overlooked opportunities.

24/7 Wall St. reviews dozens of analyst reports each day of the week. The goal is to find new investing and trading ideas for our readers. Some of the analyst reports cover stocks to buy, while other reports cover stocks to sell or to avoid.

Some color has been added on many of the following calls, and the consensus analyst price targets referenced are from Thomson Reuters. These are the top analyst upgrades, downgrades and initiations seen on Tuesday, March 7, 2017:

AbbVie (NYSE: ABBV) was reiterated as Buy with a $90 price target and was reiterated as a Top Pick at Jefferies. The firm sees the Rova-T deep dive keeping up with a multi-blockbuster potential with peak sales estimates of $4.3 billion and with peak risk-adjusted revenues of $2.8 billion by 2025.

Frontier Communications Corp. (NASDAQ: FTR) was downgraded to Neutral from Buy at Merrill Lynch. The firm noted that its post-deal free cash flow is shrinking rather than growing, so its bullish case that should have emerged now no longer remains worthy of a Buy rating.

Hyatt Hotels Corp. (NYSE: H) was raised to Equal Weight from Underweight with a $53 price target (versus a $51.48 prior close) at Morgan Stanley. Hyatt has a 52-week trading range of $44.30 to $58.05, and it has a consensus analyst price target of $56.47.

Weatherford International PLC (NYSE: WFT) was maintained as Outperform at Credit Suisse, with the call coming after Weatherford named Mark McCollum, a former Halliburton CFO, as president and CEO. This was viewed as a blessing of the restructuring efforts undertaken over the past several years. Weatherford shares were indicated up 17% at $6.91 on last look.

Other key analyst calls were seen in the following:

Agrium Inc. (NYSE: AGU) was started as Outperform and assigned a $119 price target (versus a $94.84 close) at Bernstein.

Cloud Peak Energy Inc. (NYSE: CLD) was started as Hold with a $5 price target (versus a $4.45 close) at Jefferies.

Cornerstone OnDemand Inc. (NASDAQ: CSOD) was downgraded to Neutral from Buy and the price objective was cut to $46 from $48 at Merrill Lynch.

Foundation Medicine Inc. (NYSE: FMI) was raised to Neutral with a $31 price target (versus a $31.30 close) at Janney.

Foundation Building Materials Inc. (NYSE: FBM) was started as Outperform at Raymond James and started as Neutral at Robert W. Baird. Barclays started it as Overweight and Citi started it as Buy.

NeuroDerm Ltd. (NASDAQ: NDRM) was downgraded to Perform from Outperform at Oppenheimer.

Stericycle Inc. (NASDAQ: SRCL) was raised to Neutral from Sell with a $79 price target (versus a $79.85 close) at Goldman Sachs.

Targa Resources Corp. (NYSE: TRGP) was raised to Outperform from In-Line with a $64 price target (versus a $58.32 close) at Evercore ISI.

Monday’s top analyst calls were in Apple, Dow Chemical, GoPro, Netflix, Snap, FedEx, MetLife and many more.

Follow @Jonogg on Twitter to get analyst calls and research summaries posted directly to your feed.

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