What Happened?
Shares of cybersecurity platform provider CrowdStrike (NASDAQ: CRWD) jumped 5.3% in the afternoon session after Cantor Fitzgerald reiterated its Overweight rating on the stock, citing the company's accelerating business momentum and improved financial outlook.
The firm set a price target of $590.00, noting that CrowdStrike's Net New Annual Recurring Revenue (NNARR), a key measure of growth, expanded by 73% year-over-year. In its most recent quarter, the company's revenue also grew by more than 20% compared to the same period in the previous year. Based on this strong performance, CrowdStrike's management raised its second-half 2026 NNARR growth guidance to at least 50%, up from a previous projection of about 40%. The company also expressed confidence in its future, expecting NNARR to grow by at least 20% in fiscal year 2027.
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What Is The Market Telling Us
CrowdStrike’s shares are quite volatile and have had 16 moves greater than 5% over the last year. In that context, today’s move indicates the market considers this news meaningful but not something that would fundamentally change its perception of the business.
The biggest move we wrote about over the last year was 10 months ago when the stock dropped 10.8% on the news that the company reported mixed fourth quarter (fiscal 2025) results: Its full-year revenue guidance was just in line, while full-year operating profit guidance missed Wall Street's estimates. The profit guidance miss is due to investments in platform resiliency, AI efficiencies, and sales and marketing costs, some of which are from CCPs (customer compensation packages) following the July 19th outage. On the other hand, CrowdStrike beat analysts' annual recurring revenue (ARR), revenue, and operating profit expectations during the quarter. Sales climbed 25% year-on-year, largely driven by a 27% growth in subscription revenue as companies leaned more on its Falcon platform. Overall, the quarter was solid, but the guidance was mixed, and the latter is weighing on shares.
CrowdStrike is up 6.5% since the beginning of the year, but at $483.10 per share, it is still trading 13.4% below its 52-week high of $557.53 from November 2025. Investors who bought $1,000 worth of CrowdStrike’s shares 5 years ago would now be looking at an investment worth $2,181.
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