Wells Fargo, JPMorgan See Analyst Price Target Hikes
NEW YORK (TheStreet) -- Wells Fargo
Sterne Agee's Todd Hagerman and Barclays' Jason Goldberg raised targets on both banks. Hagerman lifted Wells Fargo to $38 a share from $36 while maintaining a buy rating. He raised his JPMorgan price target to $50 from $36 while keeping his recommendation at neutral.
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Goldberg, meanwhile, lifted his JPMorgan target to $57 from $55.
JPMorgan also saw Stifel Nicolaus analyst Chris Mutascio raise his price target to $50 from $45 while he maintained a buy rating.
Wells Fargo got an additional lift from Joe Morford at RBC Capital Markets. Morford raised his target to $37 from $35 while maintaining an outperform rating on the shares.
Wells Fargo earned $4 billion, or 75 cents per share, beating analyst estimates of 0.73 on strong mortgage banking revenues.
JPMorgan earned $3.7 billion, or 90 cents a share. While the number was well short of analysts' expectations of $1.18 a share, that was largely due to an accounting oddity that causes a hit to earnings when banks' creditworthiness improves. Adjusting for that factor, JPM earned $1.45 a share, according to Sandler O'Neill research. Analysts cited strong trading results and improving consumer credit for JPMorgan's strong performance.
One analyst who took a more skeptical view of Wells Fargo was Oppenheimer's Chris Kotowski. The analyst lowered his price target on the bank to $35 from $37, even though he maintained an outperform rating on the shares.
Despite the positive analyst reception, shares of both banks were below their pre-earnings levels in mid-morning trading on Monday as Citigroup
-- Written by Dan Freed in New York.
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