Microsoft Stock Just Hit New High, But Analyst Says Rally Isn’t Done Yet — Retail Mood Stays Subdued

Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) stock received a price target boost on Wednesday but retail traders’ reaction to the positive analyst action was subdued.

Wedbush tech analyst Daniel Ives raised the price target for Microsoft stock to $600 from $515 and maintained an ‘Outperform’ rating.

The new price target implied nearly 22% upside from the stock’s closing price on Wednesday.

The analyst attributed the price target hike to “incrementally bullish” recent artificial intelligence (AI) customer checks in the field. He noted a massive adoption of Copilot, the software giant’s AI-powered chatbot, and its public cloud Azure’s monetization. 

“We have seen deal conversions for broader enterprise scale AI deployments ‘accelerating’ in the field as the AI Revolution takes hold,” Ives said, adding that the company’s customers were increasingly deploying enterprise use cases across several verticals such as financials, government, and retail.

Ives noted that Microsoft was doubling down on its AI monetization strategy within the cloud as it continues its data center build to keep pace with scaling laws and capitalize on strong demand trajectory. 

“We view MSFT as the clear front runner on the enterprise hyper scale AI front, despite increasing competition from Amazon/AWS and Google/GCP,” he added.

The analyst estimates that Copilot deployments with Microsoft customers could add another $25 billion to the company’s revenue by the fiscal year 2026.

On Stocktwits, retail sentiment toward Microsoft stock worsened to ‘neutral’ (49/100) by late Wednesday from ‘bullish’ a day ago, but the message volume stayed ‘high.’

A bearish watcher said, “Co-Pilot is a total bust” as they shared a news article that said Microsoft was struggling to sell it to corporations due to employee preference for OpenAI’s ChatGPT.

However, another user said the stock could climb before stalling at $535-$550.

Microsoft, the second most-valued global company, has seen its stock surge by 16% this year. It touched an all-time high of $494.56 on Wednesday.

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