We recently compiled a list of the Oppenheimer’s Favorite Stocks For Next 12 Months: Top 32 Stock Picks. In this article, we are going to take a look at where CyberArk Software Ltd. (NASDAQ:CYBR) stands against Oppenheimer’s other favorite stocks for the next 12 months.

The tail end of August is appearing to turn a fresh page for Wall Street. The highlight event of the month was the Federal Reserve’s Jackson Hole Economic Summit, where Fed Chair Jerome Powell was expected to set the tone for the central bank’s interest rate cut cycle. Powell didn’t disappoint and commented that the “upside risks to inflation have diminished. And the downside risks to employment have increased” which leads him to conclude that the “time has come for policy to adjust. The direction of travel is clear, and the timing and pace of rate cuts will depend on incoming data, the evolving outlook, and the balance of risks.”

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Naturally, investors took this in full stride and the benchmark S&P flagship index soared by 1.01% to be just 1% shy of its record high in July. Before Chair Powell’s comments, earlier in the month, investment bank Oppenheimer had released its latest list of 32 stocks for the next twelve months. These stocks have been picked on the basis of their fundamentals, say the firm’s analysts,  and are the “most timely” as per the firm’s analysts.

This latest set of stock picks comes as the firm has grown progressively bullish about the stock market over the course of 2024. The year started out with a report that set a 2024 close target for the flagship benchmark S&P index at 5,200. Right now, the index is at 5,634, so safe to say, the market has continued to defy expectations primarily because of investor mania for artificial intelligence. As he quoted chief investment strategist John Stoltzfus’s 5,200 index target, analyst James Watt admitted that while 2024 is the crucial election year in America, his firm’s clients should instead focus on the economy.

Taking a bullish view, the analyst shared that with “growing GDP, a jobs picture that continues to be strong, moderating inflation, and stable interest rates, our economic statistics look good.” Watt also commented on the interest rate scenario and conceded that “long term interest rates are notoriously hard to predict.” However, the economists’ expectations back then were “anywhere between one and three interest rate cuts,” and these could lead to the “tremendous amount of cash on the sidelines which will eventually be invested over the coming years” creating further upward pressure on equities.

One key factor that Watt mentioned is something that we’ve come across in analysis done by other investment firms too. Sharing “that the universe of investable stocks has significantly decreased over the years,” he also shared that “there are only 35 companies with a capitalization over $200 billion and just 83 companies with a capitalization over $100 billion.” These “are the companies the vast bulk of funds are invested in,” with the analyst warning that the key implication from this could lead to the supply and demand driving “the price of these dramatically due to limited supply.”

As the second quarter of 2024 came to a close, Watt’s views on the bifurcation in the stock market based on market capitalization remained unchanged. In his overview for Q3 2024, the analyst shared that “the NASDAQ and S&P are not really diversified when it comes to performance.” Since this concentration in just a handful of securities tends to nudge investors towards a non diversified stock portfolio, the analyst added that this “anomaly hasn’t always been the case but the long term benefits of diversification have remained a constant way to get through various market gyrations.”

However, by Q3, the financial firm’s views on the benchmark flagship S&P index had evolved. By then, Stoltzfus has first increased the target to 5,500 from 5,200 in March, sharing that an evolution in investor “mindset driven not so much by fear and greed but a need to invest for intermediate to longer-term goals suggest to us an opportunity to tweak our target higher.” As if this wasn’t enough, the strategy lead was out with another revision in August.

This boosted the target to 5,900 on the back of an upward revision of the P/E multiple to 23.1 from the earlier 22. Two additional key factors that drove the strategist’s optimism were an innovation cycle that was both cyclical and secular driving all 11 S&P sectors, and a generational shift in investment strategies driven “not so much by fear and greed but a need to invest for intermediate to longer term goal.”

Stoltzfus followed up a month later with an in depth analysis of the top 500 S&P index firms’ Q2 earnings to see which sectors had done well despite the mixed economic climate. Mind you, this analysis came just before his firm had released its latest set of 32 stocks, so it is important to learn its conclusions from the Q2 2024 earnings season. The strategist shared that the four sectors that were seeing double digit earnings growth were health care, financials, utilities, and consumer discretionary. Their earnings growth sat at 17%, 13%, 15%, and 16%, respectively. Stoltzfus added that nine out of 11 sectors had shown positive earnings growth, with the 8.5% overall growth leading to a surprise upside.

Looking at the robust data set, the analyst concluded:

“We remain overweight US equities while maintaining some meaningful exposure to international developed and emerging markets as the US Central Bank moves towards easier policy on greater confidence that its efforts to put untoward levels of inflation in check have been or are growing closer to being met. Volatility should be expected as the economy and the markets navigate the transitions taking place in the economy and monetary policy in a move towards greater normalization.”

So, as Oppenheimer continues to keep its eye on the evolving US economy and markets, we decided to see which stocks are on its radar.

Our Methodology

To make our list of Oppenheimer’s top stocks, we ranked its latest list of 32 stocks by the average analyst share price percentage upside.

For these stocks, we also mentioned the number of hedge fund investors. Why are we interested in the stocks that hedge funds pile into? The reason is simple: our research has shown that we can outperform the market by imitating the top stock picks of the best hedge funds. Our quarterly newsletter’s strategy selects 14 small-cap and large-cap stocks every quarter and has returned 275% since May 2014, beating its benchmark by 150 percentage points (see more details here).

CyberArk Software Ltd. (NASDAQ:CYBR)

Share Price Upside: 10%

Number of Hedge Fund Investors In Q2 2024: 55

Average Analyst Share Price Target: $308.39

CyberArk Software Ltd. (NASDAQ:CYBR) is a cybersecurity company that enables firms to manage their employee identities. Being a software as a service (SaaS) provider, CyberArk Software Ltd. (NASDAQ:CYBR) benefits from stable recurring revenue which is contingent on its ability to grow its customer base. CyberArk Software Ltd. (NASDAQ:CYBR) is also benefiting from the rise in cloud adoption in the industry as well as increasing requirements by the SEC which require firms to promptly disclose any cybersecurity events. Additionally, the broader corporate sector is also seeing a rise in the adoption of multi factor authentication identity management solutions due to rising cyber attacks. This introduces additional tailwinds for CyberArk Software Ltd. (NASDAQ:CYBR), and the firm has managed to hedge the broader drop in enterprise spending by posting 36% and 34% ARR growth during its Q4 2023 and Q1 2024, respectively. Oppenheimer believes that the firm “has established itself as a leader in the privileged account management sector and has expanded into new growth areas.”

Another growing identity management area is machine identity management, as AI creates new opportunities and threats for the industry. Here’s what CyberArk Software Ltd. (NASDAQ:CYBR)’s management had to say during the Q1 2024 earnings call:

“The world of securing machine identities is changing rapidly. Organizations are grappling with a larger variety and an ever-growing number of machines from applications to bots to workloads to IoT devices. Each one of these machines needs to be secured and managed across the life cycle of multiple identity components from secrets to digital keys to certificates. The proliferation of AI is further accelerating the growth and complexity of machine identities. This is becoming a top security challenge.

Traditionally, managing machines often sits outside the security teams remit of control. However, this practice exponentially increases risk and is unsustainable in today’s threat landscape. Customers increasingly realize they need to scale their machine identity security programs beyond local vaults, loosely enforced policies and opensource tools. They need an enterprise-ready machine identity security approach that can scale and is tied into their human identity security program through a single platform. One great win that exhibited all I am describing was with a CyberArk customer who has been with us since 2018. We expanded our long-standing relationship with the Department for Work and Pensions in the U.K. with an expanded program while kicking off a robust secrets management program.”

Overall CYBR ranks 19th on our list of Oppenheimer’s favorite stocks for the next 12 months. While we acknowledge the potential of CYBR as an investment, our conviction lies in the belief that some AI stocks hold greater promise for delivering higher returns and doing so within a shorter timeframe. If you are looking for an AI stock that is more promising than CYBR but that trades at less than 5 times its earnings, check out our report about the cheapest AI stock.

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Disclosure: None. This article is originally published at Insider Monkey.