UBS Group cut Goldman Sachs to $1,010 from $1,150 on Monday, trimming its view of The Goldman Sachs Group even as the stock traded at $893.52. The new target still points to 13.04% upside from that price, but it also lands in the middle of a crowded analyst field that has not settled on a single view.
For Investors in The Goldman Sachs Group, the shift changes the math rather than the story: the stock still sits below the UBS target, yet the gap is narrower than before. UBS Group kept a neutral rating on the name, which leaves the firm saying the shares are neither an obvious bargain nor an easy short.
Monday’s $893.52 Trading Price
$893.52 was the stock’s Monday midday price after it fell $9.04, a move that left it below UBS Group’s new target and below MarketBeat’s consensus target of $1,066.60. That spread matters because it shows how much room remains between the market price and what the sell side is willing to pay for earnings and capital return over the next 12 months.
1,896,422 shares changed hands against an average volume of 2,203,667, a lighter session that suggests the target cut arrived without a flood of extra turnover. The shares also remain above the 50-day simple moving average of $1,003.32 and the 200-day simple moving average of $985.60, which puts Monday’s trade under both recent trend markers.
10 Buy Ratings, 12 Hold Ratings
10 research analysts rate Goldman Sachs a Buy, 12 rate it Hold, and 1 rates it Sell, a mix that helps explain why the new UBS target does not stand alone. Oppenheimer downgraded the stock from market perform to underperform on Tuesday, June 30th, while Evercore reiterated an outperform rating on Monday, July 6th, Barclays lifted its target to $1,245.00 on Wednesday, July 15th, and Bank of America raised its objective to $1,300.00 on Thursday, July 16th.
$1,050.00 is Citigroup’s latest target after a cut from $1,200.00 on Wednesday, September 23rd, which puts that house closer to UBS Group than to Bank of America. If the target spread keeps widening, the stock will keep trading less on one clean consensus and more on how each firm weighs valuation against earnings power.
Goldman Earnings and Valuation
$20.98 per share was Goldman Sachs’ last quarterly profit, beating the $14.47 estimate by $6.51 as revenue reached $20.34 billion, above the $16.22 billion forecast. Revenue rose 39.4% from the same quarter a year earlier, and sell-side analysts now expect 68.4 EPS for the current year, leaving plenty of room for firms to disagree on how much of that strength should already be priced in.
13.79 is the stock’s P/E ratio and 0.93 is its PEG ratio, while the market capitalization stands at $260.17 billion and the beta is 1.29. BlackRock Inc. bought a new position worth approximately $24,172,123,000 during the second quarter, and State Street Corp boosted its stake by 2.1% during the fourth quarter, which keeps institutional demand in the picture even as the analyst tape turns mixed.
Why did UBS Group cut Goldman Sachs to $1,010 while MarketBeat still shows a $1,066.60 average target and a Hold rating? The answer now sits in the gap between a neutral call and a stock still trading beneath both its latest target and its longer moving averages.
Goldman Sachs holds near $893.52, and that leaves investors weighing whether Monday’s cut was a caution flag or just another recalibration in a market that already has 10 Buy calls, 12 Hold calls, and one Sell call on the board.
