CrowdStrike Holdings, Inc. (NASDAQ: CRWD) has completely recovered from last summer’s massive outage. Let’s say it has recovered and then some. After losing half of its value and challenging $200 last August, now this stock has recovered up to $470 — and earnings are on deck in a week.
Wall Street has been issuing tactical calls for investors maintaining mostly positive ratings and higher price targets. Tactical Bulls wants to see what the trends look like ahead of those earnings. Earlier in 2025, before the market carnage took over, there were many more brokerage firm analysts raising their price targets than they were cutting their targets.
And now for the main dilemma — CrowdStrike’s stock price has risen far enough that it has surpassed many of the more positive analyst price targets, even with CrowdStrike’s price down 1% at $467.00 on Wednesday,
These are the top analyst price target hikes seen in May:
- Reiterated as Overweight at Barclays and price target raised to $500 from $475
- Reiterated Buy at Stifel and price target raised to $480 from $435
- Reiterated Overweight at Morgan Stanley and price target raised to $455 from $415
- Reiterated as Market Outperform and its target was raised to $500 from $400 at JMP Securities.
Mizuho was the one standout firm issuing a downgrade to Neutral from Outperform on May 15, in part on valuation and in part on some concerns, while the firm maintained its $425 price target – with shares trading around 4430 around the call. Their report said:
“We believe CrowdStrike remains very well positioned for future growth. Having said that, our recent CrowdStrike checks have moderated while some potential risk factors have emerged, and yet the shares have been remarkably robust and now trade above our $425 price target.”
Another downgrade was seen from DZ Bank, cutting the rating to Sell from Buy on May 22 with a $370 price target.
Morgan Stanley’s most recent price target hike was part of a broader IT/Security report. It is a favored company as you can see in its report:
Starting with CrowdStrike, given incrementally improving reseller data and channel checks, CrowdStrike positions as one of the ‘Best Athletes’ in software and expect estimates to move higher throughout this year against a backdrop of macro uncertainty and increasing growth scarcity in broader software, which should justify the stock’s premium valuation (18x 2026 EV/Sales vs. 11x large cap software average).
CFRA (S&P) reiterated its Buy rating and $478 price target just in recent days. That report said:
We maintain our Buy rating on CRWD given our bullish medium to long-term outlook. While economic headwinds have intensified and are likely to increase near-term sales uncertainty, we expect demand for CRWD’s solutions to remain resilient. Cybersecurity is a priority in enterprise IT budgets, and firms are expected to consolidate and expand with the largest platform vendors for their security needs. CRWD is executing well in our opinion, and underlying demand for the Falcon platform remains very strong, even as we see some pressures to the ARR numbers from its pricing discounts related to the outage. Near-term ARR and revenue growth headwinds should fade as we lap the IT outage impact in 2H FY 26 – management expects net new ARR reacceleration and margin expansion in 2H.
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