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 after their 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 issuing a "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.