Symantec makes to “Most Dangerous Stocks” list.

by Kris_Tuttle on June 5, 2008

A few days ago our friends over at New Con­structs released their Most Dan­ger­ous Stocks for June list and we couldn’t help but note that SYMC was added to the large cap list.

The stock has had a great short term rally since we pub­lished our research note on April 30th, high­light­ing the chal­lenges the com­pany is fac­ing in their core mar­ket accord­ing to their cus­tomers.  We rec­om­mended it as a short but on a fun­da­men­tal ver­sus a trad­ing basis.

With the stock up from $17 and change to about $21 we feel the short is look­ing more attrac­tive.  Our price tar­get remains $14.

The com­pany will be host­ing their ana­lyst meet­ing on June 12th and we expect more gen­eral enthu­si­asm around the meet­ing since man­age­ment is very good at telling ana­lysts and investors what they want to hear.

Insid­ers have been sell­ing heav­ily with no buy­ing.  The CEO, John Thomp­son, has taken $3.5M out in May alone.

Sen­ti­ment on the name has improved but there con­tin­ues to be room for more upside if man­age­ment gets more ana­lysts over to their way of think­ing around the meet­ing.  Despite the recent stock move ana­lyst com­mu­nity is mostly at a Hold (20) with 12 at Strong Buy/Buy and 1 lone Sell rating.

We’re cur­rently short the name but secretly hop­ing for some fur­ther share appre­ci­a­tion and fur­ther con­fir­ma­tion of our con­cerns on the fundamentals.

Any­one long or short SYMC should read the research note above as it con­tains quite a bit of cus­tomer data that loudly sug­gests man­age­ment is out of the loop on the fundamentals.

– Kris Tuttle

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