Hottest Stocks in CW 39/26

The start of the past week delivered the biggest movement at Palo Alto Networks: The share of the cybersecurity specialist jumped 13.1 percent. This was preceded by warnings from leading AI companies about risks posed by increasingly powerful models, including dangers from automated cyberattacks. Palo Alto protects networks, cloud applications and end devices with a broad platform. Overall, the stock gained 11.5 percent last week.

J.P. Morgan estimates the additional global spending potential for cybersecurity due to AI at more than 430 billion dollars within three years and considers Palo Alto one of the preferred providers because of its broad platform. After the rally, Bernstein downgraded the stock from “Outperform” to “Market Perform”. At the same time, the firm raised its price target from 253 dollars to 351 dollars and justified the downgrade with the sharply increased valuation. Since the beginning of July, the stock has been moving sideways with strong fluctuations and currently costs around 364 dollars.

The wikifolio traders see greater opportunities for an upward breakout in the current environment for the most part. The trading sentiment shows a clear buying surplus over the past seven days. Ralf Hölscher from Heemann Vermögensverwaltung contributed to this several times. In their wikifolio Aktien-Chance, Palo Alto Networks now has a portfolio weighting of 3.0 percent. The investment professionals trade a mix of investment styles based on technical and fundamental analyses. Growth and value stocks are intended to be distributed approximately equally. Since spring 2019, this concept has generated a performance of 192 percent or 15.2 percent per year on average.

At Asta Energy Solutions, the week began with strong fluctuations. On the Vienna Stock Exchange, the share fell by more than 15 percent on Monday and recovered almost as strongly on Wednesday. Over the entire past week, however, the stock was still down 6.8 percent. ASTA manufactures highly precise copper solutions for power generation, power transmission and electromobility and supplies companies such as Siemens Energy, GE Vernova and Andritz, among others. The sharp decline on Monday coincided with the broad weakness in AI and infrastructure stocks following calls for a slower pace of development for powerful AI models.

Last Monday, Baader Bank raised its price target for the stock from 65 euros to 69 euros and confirmed “Add”. The institution raised its financial forecasts through 2028 and referred to the half-year figures as well as the investment cycle in energy infrastructure. In the first half of the year, ASTA increased revenue by 22.2 percent to 435.8 million euros and adjusted EBITDA by 54.2 percent to 37.0 million euros. For 2026, management continues to expect adjusted EBITDA of 60 million to 64 million euros; previously, 55 million to 59 million euros had been forecast.

The wikifolio traders are also confident, which is why the price setback was mostly used for buying. Top trader Christian Scheid also bought the stock at the start of the past week and added it to his highly successful wikifolio Special Situations long/short. The financial journalist has been trading “special situations” on the stock market here for almost 13 years and has increased the value of the model portfolio by 950 percent since then. This corresponds to an annual average gain in value of exactly 20 percent.

The Palantir share continued its recent recovery last week and gained another 7.0 percent in value. The software company combines data from companies and government agencies and makes it usable for operational decisions and AI applications. At the AIPCon 11 customer event, Cisco, Nvidia, the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and L3Harris, among others, demonstrated specific applications of Foundry, AIP and the Ontology platform.

Shortly beforehand, Palantir had made AIP Evolve generally available. The system coordinates AI agents that can, among other things, reduce model costs and latency and improve evaluation results. Following the event, UBS responded by raising its price target from 220 dollars to 250 dollars and confirmed its “Buy” rating. The firm referred to discussions with customers and continued high demand for Palantir’s AI platform among large companies. The Swiss bank also emphasized that Palantir integrates powerful AI models into operational business processes. With its new target price, UBS is now significantly above the average analyst price target, which currently stands at around 209 dollars. The stock closed at 177.64 dollars in the USA on Friday.

The slight selling surplus observed on wikifolio.com in recent days was mainly due to smaller partial sales. Michael Gottschalk, for example, realized a gain of 1,473 percent with the stock for his wikifolio Climax Institutes Invest Exa. However, with a portfolio weighting of more than 19 percent, Palantir remains by far the largest holding in the portfolio, which has posted a gain of 52 percent (9.4 percent p.a.) since February 2022.

Richard Dobetsberger is up around 1,800 percent (23 percent p.a.) with his wikifolio FuTecUS, launched in mid-2012. Here too, Palantir is the largest portfolio holding, although part of the position was sold on Thursday with a gain of 19 percent.

Constellation Energy lost 9.5 percent last week. On Monday alone, the stock fell 7.1 percent. On the same trading day, Nvidia lost 3.4 percent and Micron more than 5 percent after leading AI companies called for a slower pace of development for particularly powerful models because of security risks. As a major U.S. power generator, Constellation Energy is one of the companies directly exposed to the growing energy demand from data centers.

However, this news was not enough to sustainably break the stock’s negative trend. In this environment, some wikifolio traders also pulled the ripcord. Irina Staudinger reduced her position in Constellation Energy in the wikifolio Positionshoehe und alle Werte to a very small remaining holding. The trader invests in leveraged products on U.S. indices as well as stocks that, in her view, have growth potential. Since spring 2023, this has resulted in a very considerable gain of 781 percent (85 percent p.a.). Since the wikifolio became tradable as a certificate in August 2023, its price has risen by 92 percent. So far this year, it has fallen by 9 percent.

Shortly beforehand, Constellation Energy had agreed to purchase the Rhode Island State Energy Center from Shell for 715 million dollars. The gas-fired power plant has a capacity of 609 megawatts and sells electricity and capacity in the ISO New England market. Last week, Constellation joined the AI Energy Management Alliance founded by Google, Nvidia and Emerald AI as a founding member. The alliance aims to advance flexible electricity demand from AI data centers.

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