With signs suggesting inflation is finally being tamed, 2023 opened with hope the Fed will take a less aggressive stance in its efforts to tame it and will start cutting interest rates. However, don’t get too hopeful that is about to actually happen this year, says Lotfi Karoui, Goldman Sachs’ chief credit strategist.
“No pivot. Certainly no cuts in 2023,” Karoui recently said, claiming the earliest the Fed will consider lowering rates could be in the first or second quarter of 2024. It’s not all bad, however; Karoui expects a ‘soft landing’ for the U.S. economy and thinks the odds of a recession hitting are generally quite low.
Whatever lies ahead, in the stock market there will always be opportunities for investors to take advantage of and Kash Rangan, Karoui’s analyst colleague at the banking giant, has been seeking out the equities he believes are primed to push ahead from here. In fact, Rangan sees a pair of stocks posting gains of at least 70% in the year ahead.
We ran these choices through the TipRanks database to get a feel for what the rest of the Street has in mind for these names. Let’s check the results.
Salesforce, Inc. (CRM)
The first stock piquing Goldman’s interest is one of the better-known names in tech and marketing. Salesforce has long been a leader in the Customer Relationship Management niche. The company offers cloud-based software solutions and apps for sales, service, and marketing, through the popular SaaS model. The company boasts that enterprise users won’t need IT experts to set up the software, and that more than 150,000 customers have used Salesforce to improve their customer relations.
Like many others in the tech sector, CRM has seen volatility in the share performance over the past year. Nevertheless, the company has still been posting steady revenues and earnings gains. In the last reported quarter, from fiscal 3Q23 (October quarter), revenue grew 14% year-over-year to reach $7.84 billion, while the non-GAAP EPS figure of $1.40 was up 10% from the prior-year figure. Salesforce guided toward revenue between $7.93 billion…
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