Splunk upped its revenue forecasts, too
Splunk Inc (NASDAQ: SPLK) is headed for its best month since August, with the shares up 8.9% so far in November. Today, SPLK stock is up 6.3% to trade at $108.07, after the company reported strong third-quarter earnings and revenue, and upped its full-year sales forecasts for 2019 and 2020. Splunk also shared that its current CFO has decided to retire in March 2020.
Shares of the software concern struggled aftertheir late-August bull gap and subsequent all-time high, touched on Sept. 5. Today, however, SPLK is set to break out of that downward channel, and is on pace to top its 50-day moving average for the first time since Oct. 4.
Analysts are mostly bullish on SPLK, too, with the majority of the 26 analysts who follow the stock issuinga "strong buy" rating. After earnings today, the security received mixed analyst attention. While Wedbush raised its price target to $136 from $130, BMO trimmed its target to $132 from $133. Still, both targets represents uncharted territory for Splunk.
In the options pits, SPLK's Schaeffer's put/call open interest ratio (SOIR) of 0.74 sits in the high 78th percentile of its annual range, indicating that while short-term call open interest still outnumbers put open interest on an absolute basis, near-term traders were more put-heavy than usual ahead of earnings.