Nvidia (NVDA, $306.20) stock has been red-hot recently, with the shares up 57% since bouncing off the $200 mark in early October.
But can the semiconductor company keep the momentum going after Nvidia's third-quarter report, scheduled on the earnings calendar for after Wednesday's close?
Wall Street pros are certainly upbeat ahead of the results.
CFRA Research analyst Angelo Zino, for instance, recently lifted his price target on NVDA stock to $330 from $212 to reflect "our greater confidence surrounding growth prospects and upside potential to consensus estimates."
In addition to an improving supply-chain situation for Nvidia, "we think the possibilities ahead for the graphics processing unit (GPU) space are enormous – gaming, data centers and autonomous vehicles – and poised to gain a greater wallet share from cloud service providers than we previously anticipated," he adds.
The optimism is shared by Wedbush analyst Matt Bryson. True, he recently downgraded the stock to Neutral from Outperform – the equivalents of Hold and Buy, respectively – but said that while he would typically "want to tie a rating change to some sort of negative catalyst; frankly there is none."
Instead, the downgrade was more a result of valuation concerns following the stock's race up the charts. He remains "very bullish" on the semiconductor stock in both the near and long term. As for the company's upcoming earnings report, Bryson believes "the combination of unprecedented demand for both data center and client offerings will allow NVDA to again exceed expectations when they report numbers."
