Street Calls of the Week: Upgrade for Procter and Gamble, Tesla downgrade

investing.com:

Investing.com — Here is your Pro Recap of the top takeaways from Wall Street analysts for the past week: upgrades for Procter & Gamble, Dollar General (NYSE:DG), UiPath (NYSE:PATH) and Thor Industries (NYSE:THO); downgrade for Tesla (NASDAQ:TSLA)

InvestingPro subscribers always get first dibs on market-moving rating changes.

What happened? On Monday, Truist upgraded Procter & Gamble (NYSE:PG) to Buy with a $175 price target.

What’s the full story? Truist’s upgrade is based on approximately 25.5x their FY25 EPS estimate, compared to the large cap HPC/Personal Care median of about 23x and PG’s 5-year average of approximately 23.5x. The brokerage maintains its recently raised estimates.

The analysts’ recommendation and price target are based on their belief that investors are shifting focus in 2024 to Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG) companies with volume growth (let’s be real, who isn’t?).

Procter & Gamble, having returned to volume growth in F2Q24 (excluding China), recently provided encouraging commentary around its China business. In Truist’s view, this signals enterprise-level volume recovery in the coming quarters as the year-over-year comparisons for Procter & Gamble in China become more favorable.

Buy at Truist means “the stock’s total return is expected to outperform the S&P 500 or relevant benchmark over the next 12-18 months (unless otherwise indicated).”

How did the stock react? Procter & Gamble stock traded higher on the premarket upgrade from $160.23 to $161.71. PG opened the regular session at $161.43 and closed at $161.55, a gain of 0.75%.

What happened? On Tuesday, JPMorgan upgraded Dollar General to Neutral with a $159 price target.

What’s the full story? JPMorgan analysts model 4Q EPS of $1.87, above the