BMO upgraded Amgen, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMGN) to "outperform" from "market perform" earlier, and hiked its price objective to $326 from $286, implying 18.3% upside to its last close. The firm praised the drugmakers' oncology and inflammation pipeline and noted it could compete with peers in the obesity metabolic business.
There's plenty of room for other analysts to join BMO on the bullish bandwagon. Coming into today, 11 of the 20 brokerages in coverage rated AMGN a tepid "hold" or worse, and the 12-month consensus target price of $281 is only a slight premium to current trading levels.
AMGN was last seen up 0.9% to trade at $277.89. The shares are not too far off their Oct. 13, 52-week high of $288.46, with long-term support stemming from the 100-day moving average. Over the past nine months, Amgen stock has amassed a healthy 18.3% lead.
Options bulls are already chiming in, with 1,662 calls exchanged so far today -- triple the average intraday volume -- compared to only 156 puts. Most popular is the weekly 12/29 275-strike call.
This denotes a shift in sentiment, as short-term options traders have been more bearish than usual. This is per Amgen stock's Schaeffer's put/call open interest ratio (SOIR) that ranks higher than 80% annual readings.
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