{"id":5652,"date":"2026-06-25T21:00:40","date_gmt":"2026-06-25T21:00:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/digitalmarkettrends.com\/index.php\/2026\/06\/25\/stifel-just-lowered-price-target-on-microsoft-stock-find-out-more\/"},"modified":"2026-06-25T21:00:40","modified_gmt":"2026-06-25T21:00:40","slug":"stifel-just-lowered-price-target-on-microsoft-stock-find-out-more","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/digitalmarkettrends.com\/index.php\/2026\/06\/25\/stifel-just-lowered-price-target-on-microsoft-stock-find-out-more\/","title":{"rendered":"Stifel just lowered price target on Microsoft stock: find out more"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Microsoft (MSFT) shares inched lower and printed a fresh 52-week low this morning after a senior Stifel analyst, Brad Reback, lowered his price target on the tech behemoth to $400.<\/p>\n

As sentiment shifts from blind AI enthusiasm to cold financial scrutiny, MSFT\u2019s relative strength index (RSI) has crashed into the late 20s, indicating \u201coversold\u201d conditions that often trigger a near-term reversal.<\/p>\n

Still, Reback recommends some caution in playing Microsoft stock that\u2019s already down more than 25%<\/a> year-to-date.  <\/p>\n

Why Stifel lowered its price target on Microsoft stock<\/h2>\n

In his research note, Reback argued the current consensus estimates for Microsoft are \u201csomewhat\u201d ignoring the potential for severe margin compression ahead.<\/p>\n

\u201cSevere costs associated with running and scaling Azure\u2019s rapid growth will create unprecedented friction,\u201d he told clients.<\/p>\n

According to the Stifel analyst, MSFT\u2019s gross margins (2027) could shrink by 450 basis points on a year-over-year basis to about 63%, significantly below Street\u2019s optimistic consensus of 66.5%.<\/p>\n

This dramatic contraction is almost entirely structural \u2013 driven by explosive capex and subsequent heavy depreciation costs of building, cooling, and maintaining specialized AI data centers.<\/p>\n

Note that MSFT shares are currently trading decisively below their major moving averages<\/a> (MAs), reinforcing that bears remain firmly in control.<\/p>\n

What could drive MSFT shares lower from here<\/h2>\n

Stifel trimmed its price objective on Microsoft shares also because it believes the consensus EPS estimates for FY27 are inflated by a full dollar.<\/p>\n

Wall Street currently expects the titan\u2019s full-year per-share earnings to come in at $19.45, a number analyst Brad Reback sees as highly unrealistic given its surging finance lease obligations and upper single-digit operating expense growth.<\/p>\n

This structural expenditure leaves very little room for traditional enterprise cost-cutting measures to balance the scales. <\/p>\n

Plus, he also highlighted a continuous decline in organic free cash flow as a major corporate red flag.<\/p>\n

If FCF fails to rebound in FY27, Microsoft\u2019s historical flexibility to \u201caggressively\u201d fund growing shareholder dividends and execute massive share buyback plans will face restrictive boundaries \u2013 the analyst added.<\/p>\n

How to play Microsoft Corp at current levels<\/h2>\n

All in all, Stifel\u2019s research report perfectly encapsulates a broader, sector-wide realignment hitting the entire technology architecture space.<\/p>\n

The market is aggressively transitionary; investors are no longer content with magnificent top-line annualized AI run rates (such as Microsoft’s recent $37 billion metric) if it requires tracking toward an astronomical $190 billion in annual capital spending to secure it.<\/p>\n

As capex intensity across the enterprise software sector balloons, Wall Street is enforcing a stricter valuation discipline, punishing firms whose near-term cash return profiles are being swallowed by multi-year infrastructure cycles.<\/p>\n

For MSFT stock, breaking out of this bearish cycle will require proving to a newly skeptical market that its heavily funded Copilot and Azure AI products can efficiently convert into highly profitable, high-margin software recurring revenue rather than remaining capital-guzzling utilities.<\/p>\n

The post Stifel just lowered price target on Microsoft stock: find out more<\/a> appeared first on Invezz<\/a><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Microsoft (MSFT) shares inched lower and printed a fresh 52-week low this morning after a senior Stifel analyst, Brad Reback, lowered his price target on the tech behemoth to $400. As sentiment shifts from blind AI enthusiasm to cold financial scrutiny, MSFT\u2019s relative strength index (RSI) has crashed into the late 20s, indicating \u201coversold\u201d conditions […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":5653,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5652","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-stock"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/digitalmarkettrends.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5652","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/digitalmarkettrends.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/digitalmarkettrends.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/digitalmarkettrends.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/digitalmarkettrends.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5652"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/digitalmarkettrends.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5652\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/digitalmarkettrends.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5653"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/digitalmarkettrends.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5652"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/digitalmarkettrends.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5652"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/digitalmarkettrends.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5652"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}