These Stocks Were Getting Some Analyst Love On Tuesday

Although the S&P 500 has struggled to build momentum in recent days, in part due to more tempered language from the Street, analysts showered some love on five stocks on Tuesday, raising their price targets on them, and in some cases their ratings.

In this article, we’ll take a closer look at yesterday’s analyst action and commentary on Baidu Inc (ADR) (NASDAQ:BIDU), Columbia Sportswear Company (NASDAQ:COLM), Cirrus Logic, Inc. (NASDAQ:CRUS), Jabil Circuit, Inc. (NYSE:JBL), and Kirby Corporation (NYSE:KEX) and see what the smart money thinks of each stock.

At Insider Monkey, we track around 750 hedge funds and institutional investors. Through extensive backtests, we have determined that imitating some of the stocks that these investors are collectively bullish on, can help retail investors generate double digits of alpha per year. The key is to focus on the small-cap picks of these funds, which are usually less followed by the broader market and allow for larger price inefficiencies (see the details here).

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Analysts at Deutsche Bank gave the thumbs up to Baidu Inc (ADR) (NASDAQ:BIDU) yesterday, maintaining their ‘Buy’ rating on the stock and raising their price target on it to $219 from $182. Like other Chinese internet stocks, Baidu shares have recovered somewhat since early-August, as sentiment in the sector improves. Moreover, Baidu recently entered into an alliance with NVIDIA Corporation (NASDAQ:NVDA) to create a self-driving car platform. If successful, Baidu could have another valuable cash flow stream aside from search, which is be fraught with political sensitivity in China. According to our records, the smart money tempered its enthusiasm for the Chinese search engine in the second quarter. Of the 749 hedge funds that we track which filed 13Fs for the June quarter, 56 of them owned shares of Baidu Inc (ADR) (NASDAQ:BIDU) at the end of June, down by 16 funds from the end of March.

Count Canaccord analyst Camilo Lyon as a fan of Columbia Sportswear Company (NASDAQ:COLM), as the analyst upgraded the stock to ‘Buy’ from ‘Hold’ and hiked his target price on it to $72 from $59 on Tuesday. Lyon believes improved idiosyncratic and macro factors will help boost demand, while diminishing forex headwinds and a more profitable direct-to-consumer shift could drive earnings for the quarters to come. 20 funds in our system had a long position in Columbia Sportswear Company (NASDAQ:COLM) at the end of the second quarter, unchanged from that end of the first quarter.

On the next page, we’ll examine why analysts gave the thumbs up to Cirrus Logic, Jabil Circuit, and Kirby Corporation yesterday.