Cognizant Technology (CTSH) Ascends After “Buy” Rating

Cognizant Technology Solutions Corp. (NASDDAQ:CTSH) rose 0.24% to $58.80 in pre-market hours on Thursday, April 13, after SunTrust upgraded his view of the company’s shares to “buy” from “hold.”

Most recently, Berenberg initiated coverage on the company last March with a “hold” rating, and Morgan Stanley downgraded the shares to “overweight” last January.

The analyst’s rating also comes a day after the company scheduled its first-quarter 2017 earnings conference call on May 05. Cognizant Technology Solutions Corp. (NASDDAQ:CTSH) previously filed its year-to-date financial statement, reporting $561 million of GAAP income from operations, and $0.68 in diluted EPS for the fourth quarter of 2016, which increased from P553 million in GAAP income from operations and $0.69 cents per share in the fourth quarter of 2015.

Cognizant Technology Solutions Corporation is a provider of information technology consulting and business process services.

Cognizant_Logo.svg

What Does The Smart Money Sentiment Say?

The Smart Money sentiment was bullish on Cognizant Technology Solutions Corp. (NASDDAQ:CTSH) shares as we saw an increase in positions held quarter over quarter in 2016. Out of the 742 funds we track at Insider Monkey, we saw 55 funds who held shares valued at $1.96 billion in the fourth quarter of 2016, compared to only 47 funds in the previous quarter of the same year.

If we look closer into hedge fund movement, we saw Richard S. Pzena of Pzena Investment Management up its activity on Cognizant by 404% as of December 2016. Pzena currently holds 4.7 million shares valued at $265 million.

At Insider Monkey, we’ve developed an investment strategy that has delivered market-beating returns over the past 12 months. Our strategy identifies the 100 best-performing funds of the previous quarter from among the collection of 700+ successful funds that we track in our database, which we accomplish using our returns methodology. We then study the portfolios of those 100 funds using the latest 13F data to uncover the 30 most popular mid-cap stocks (market caps of between $1 billion and $10 billion) among them to hold until the next filing period. This strategy delivered 39.7% gains over the past 12 months and outperformed the 24.1% gain enjoyed by the S&P 500 ETFs. Our enhanced small-cap hedge fund strategy returned more than 45% over the last 12 months and outperformed SPY by more than 30 percentage points over the last 4.5 years (see details here).

The Bottom Line

Cognizant Technology Solutions Corp. (NASDDAQ:CTSH) rose 0.24% after receiving a “buy” rating from SunTrust Robinson. For more reading, check out the 10 largest financial services companies by AUM.

Follow Caterpillar Inc (NYSE:CAT)