After Carnival announced a $1B common equity raise and said it expects to use the proceeds from the offering for general corporate purposes as well as addressing their 2023 debt maturities, Stifel analyst Steven Wieczynski said that assuming the equity raise gets priced around $10 per share that he estimates the raise would dilute the company by about 8.5% including the convertible shares. This equity raise “will cause concern (actually let’s call it panic) across the investment community for sure,” contends Wieczynski, who thinks investors will question why Carnival is doing this now when they raised $1B via a debt offering in May. However, this equity raise is aligned with their strategy that they laid out on their last couple of business update calls to address their 2023 maturities as soon as possible and while this fundraising “is frustrating and will cause panic,” he doesn’t believe this is any indication that their business trends are deteriorating, the analyst argues. He maintains his Buy rating and his price target stays at $20 “for now,” Wieczynski added.