Check out today’s top analyst calls from around Wall Street, compiled by The Fly. NVIDIA DOUBLE UPGRADE AHEAD OF EARNINGS: Wells Fargo analyst Aaron Rakers upgraded Nvidia (NVDA) two notches to Outperform from Underperform and raised his price target to $315 from $140, citing the company’s competitive position in gaming as well as its AI / deep learning data center growth opportunities. Rakers also points to the company’s new Turing GPU architecture as well as the “well-understood” investor perception of weakening in cryptocurrency-related demand. MKM SAYS LOOK BEYOND NEAR-TERM, BUY HASBRO: MKM Partners analyst Eric Handler upgraded Hasbro (HAS) to Buy from Neutral and raised his price target to $115 from $92 as he contends investors should look beyond the 2018 industry issues and anticipate a “material fundamental recovery” in the next two years thanks to the company’s large toy line additions and expected margin expansion. WESTERN DIGITAL CUT TO PERFORM: Cowen analyst Karl Ackerman downgraded Western Digital (WDC) to Market Perform from Outperform as his recent supply chain field work pointed to “substantial, unabated competitive pricing tactics” by the company and Toshiba (TOSBF) to gain share of enterprise and client solid state drives. He also worries that Western Digital’s efforts to scale back incremental NAND wafer adds to support pricing is not without significant risk. STIFEL SAYS BUY GW PHARMA AHEAD OF EPIDIOLEX LAUNCH: Stifel analyst Paul Matteis started GW Pharmaceuticals with a Buy rating and $181 price target, as he expects a “strong” Epidiolex launch in Dravet/Lennox Gastaut and put an 80% odds-of-success for Epidiolex in Tuberous Sclerosis complex. The analyst’s epilepsy physician survey suggests broad physician and patient awareness of Epidiolex ahead of the launch, believes the 2019 consensus sales estimate of $115M “seems doable” and forecasts Epidiolex will hit $1.5B in U.S. sales in 2023.
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