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Bernstein Downgrades 3 Cybersecurity Stocks: How Concerned Should Investors Be?
Author: Chris Markoch. Posted: 9/29/2026.
Key Points
- Bernstein analyst Peter Weed downgraded Palo Alto Networks, Okta, and SentinelOne to Market Perform while simultaneously raising his price targets on all three stocks.
- Despite the downgrades, most other analysts remain bullish, with Palo Alto, Okta, and SentinelOne all holding majority Buy ratings and rising consensus price targets.
- All three cybersecurity stocks have posted strong 2026 gains and now trade near their consensus price targets amid growing focus on AI-related security demand.
- Special Report: The Untouched Energy Source Behind a New Eight Year Tax Break
Is the party over for cybersecurity stocks? Investors might think so after Peter Weed of Sanford Bernstein downgraded three cybersecurity stocks. He downgraded Palo Alto Networks (NASDAQ: PANW) from Outperform to Market Perform; the same was true of Okta Inc. (NASDAQ: OKTA) and SentinelOne (NYSE: S).
Interestingly, Weed raised his price target on all three stocks despite the downgrades. SentinelOne was the only one whose new target exceeded the consensus target. That distinction matters because Palo Alto, Okta, and SentinelOne are all trading near their respective consensus price targets.
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Elon Musk quietly filed a document with the federal government tied to artificial intelligence, one of the largest markets in the world.
James Altucher, who previously flagged Nvidia in 2008 and Bitcoin in 2013, says the filing could rival Tesla, SpaceX and xAI combined.
Few investors know this filing exists, but that is expected to change quickly.
Click here to see details on Elon Musk's newest AI filingThe entire cybersecurity sector sold off sharply early in the year as investors worried that the AI bubble would burst. Recent earnings reports have helped ease those concerns. Now, the focus has shifted toward the risks created by AI agents, which could require more aggressive cybersecurity measures.
That has led many analysts to raise their price targets since the sector reported quarterly earnings. That's a bullish sign for investors hoping for further upside in a sector that's had a strong run in 2026.
PANW Stock Near Its Price Target as ARR Growth Cools
Palo Alto Networks is one of the largest and most recognized names in the cybersecurity sector. PANW is up more than 111% in 2026 and just delivered a strong fourth-quarter fiscal year 2026 (FY2026) earnings report.
The company cited record execution, which is accelerating momentum for its platformization model. It also reported strong AI-related demand.
The concern is margin pressure. Palo Alto still anticipates significant growth next year, but next-generation security annual recurring revenue (NGS ARR) growth is expected to moderate to between 22% and 23% in FY2027 from 63% in FY2026.
That could be what Weed was anticipating when he set a price target of $351 on PANW. That's a 38% increase from his former price target of $253, but it's approximately 10% below the consensus price target of $390.47, which is just about where the stock trades as of this writing.
It's also worth noting that Weed isn't alone in tapping the brakes on PANW. According to MarketBeat data, Citigroup, Scotiabank, and Phillip Securities also downgraded the stock in early September. The number of analysts with a Hold rating on PANW has doubled from six to 12 in the past month. Still, 38 of the 50 analysts covering the stock rate it a Buy, giving it an overall Moderate Buy consensus rating.
OKTA Stock Rally Leaves Little Room Below Analyst Targets
Okta has outperformed Palo Alto in 2026. The stock is up more than 131% for the year, driven by its strong position in zero-trust security. The company's platform would seem to be tailor-made for a future with AI agents. That view was supported by the company's Q2 earnings report for FY2027, in which Okta reported growing demand for its AI-agent security products. However, management said that AI revenue will be immaterial to FY2027.
That may explain why Weed is bearish on OKTA. The stock trades near its consensus price target of $199.56. He gives OKTA a target of $174. That's up from $143, but it's still nearly 13% below the consensus target.
Unlike PANW, Weed is a contrarian to overall sentiment. Since his downgrade, more than a dozen analysts have raised their price targets on OKTA, and Jefferies, KeyCorp, Evercore, and Stephens now share a Street-high target of $240. MarketBeat data shows that 33 of the 43 analysts covering Okta rate it a Buy or better.
Free cash flow may be an area to watch. It has grown at an accelerated pace over the last three years. If that trend continues, the stock may be significantly undervalued at current levels. But if that growth normalizes, Weed may have the call right.
Why Bernstein's SentinelOne Price Target Beats the Consensus
SentinelOne is the smallest of the companies in this group, with a market cap of just over $7.9 billion. SentinelOne overlaps with Okta in identity threat detection, but its core business is endpoint security. In that regard, it's closer in scope to Palo Alto and CrowdStrike (NASDAQ: CRWD).
The stock is up more than 51% in 2026 and is trading about 3.5% below its consensus price target of $23.64. SentinelOne reported strong revenue and earnings per share (EPS) growth in its latest Q2 earnings report for FY2027. However, spending on AI products, go-to-market efforts, and partner channels is expected to moderate margin expansion in the coming quarters.
Weed set SentinelOne's stock price target at $25. That's up from $21 and about 5.8% above the consensus price target of $23.64. But it's well below the Street-high $28 targets from Susquehanna and Guggenheim. SentinelOne has the most divided coverage of the three, with 16 Buy ratings, 12 Holds, and one Sell among the 29 analysts tracked by MarketBeat.
NVIDIA Just Named AI's Next Bottleneck—And These 3 Stocks Sit Right In It
Author: Bridget Bennett. Posted: 9/20/2026.
Key Points
- Micron sits second in high bandwidth memory with supply booked out for years and pricing power to match
- Coherent offers broad exposure to the silicon photonics shift NVIDIA's chief executive called the next bottleneck of the decade
- Tower Semiconductor supplies the specialty foundry layer behind photonics without requiring a bet on a single winner
- Special Report: The Untouched Energy Source Behind a New Eight Year Tax Break
AI's loudest voices spent the week telling everyone to slow down, and the market took them at their word. AI infrastructure stocks sold off during a month that is traditionally unkind to equities.
Jason Bodner, co-founder of quantitative research firm MoneyFlows, thinks investors are reacting to the wrong headline. The one that matters came out of NVIDIA's (NASDAQ: NVDA) August earnings call, where CEO Jensen Huang guided to roughly 70% revenue growth next fiscal year and then told analysts that demand is running well above that level.
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Sixty-seven countries are already backing projects tied to a resource Weiss Ratings calls Computium. McKinsey projects nearly 7 trillion could flow into its infrastructure by 2030.
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Discover why 67 governments are racing to secure this resource now.That gap is the whole story. AI's constraint right now is not demand. It is the physical hardware required to move data around inside a data center, and NVIDIA named the two pinch points: memory and silicon photonics. Bodner's three picks sit at the center of both bottlenecks.
Slowing the Models Does Not Slow the Buildout
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei argued in a Sept. 12 essay that AI companies should deliberately slow the pace at which they improve model capabilities. OpenAI's Sam Altman endorsed the idea hours later, and Elon Musk backed it as well. Meanwhile, a researcher who had worked at both Anthropic and OpenAI resigned days earlier with a public warning about existential risk.
Bodner interprets the corporate response very differently from the way the market did.
In his view, regulation gives incumbents licensing regimes, capital requirements and a moat that smaller competitors cannot clear. It also makes AI acceptable for health care and government procurement. His analogy is the airline industry, which lobbied for a federal regulator and ultimately achieved mass adoption rather than grounded planes.
The macro backdrop gave sellers cover. The Federal Reserve raised rates on Sept. 16 rather than cutting them, oil is trading near $100 a barrel amid U.S.-Iran tensions, and September has a long history of eroding gains.
What is not deteriorating is profitability. Second-quarter beat rates across the S&P 500 ran well above their five-year average, while earnings growth reached its strongest level in years even after excluding a couple of outsized outliers. That is a sentiment problem, not an earnings problem.
Micron Owns the Memory Shortage NVIDIA Keeps Naming
Micron Technology (NASDAQ: MU) is the fastest-growing producer of high-bandwidth memory (HBM), the stacked chips that sit beside a graphics processor and feed it data. Bodner's framing is simple: A GPU is the world's fastest chef, and HBM keeps the ingredients on the counter instead of scattering them across town.
Management has said industry demand continues to significantly exceed supply, and that tightness could persist well beyond next year. Micron's HBM output has been selling out ahead of production, and analysts have responded with steadily higher forward estimates. Bodner's point is that a stock can be up several hundred percent and still look cheap if its forward numbers are moving faster than its price.
NVIDIA is effectively underwriting the shortage. Its supply commitments more than doubled in a single quarter, primarily because of memory procurement. Fabs do not go up overnight, capacity is being spoken for, and pricing power follows.
Coherent Sits Where Copper Runs Out
Copper wiring works well at the chip level, but it becomes problematic across a data center. Resistance, heat and distance all add up, so the AI industry is shifting from copper to optical connections. That transition is silicon photonics, which Huang has called the bottleneck of the coming decade.
Coherent Corp. (NYSE: COHR) supplies the lasers, transceivers and optical materials that support the technology. NVIDIA is investing $2 billion in Coherent alongside a multibillion-dollar purchase commitment and future access to its capacity. Lumentum Holdings (NASDAQ: LITE) received an identical commitment the same day, suggesting that NVIDIA is buying insurance for a supply chain it expects to strain.
The stock has pulled back sharply along with the rest of the AI complex. Bodner's view is that the group has already absorbed much of its selling pressure while energy, health care and gold rallied.
Tower Semiconductor Makes the Wafers Photonics Runs On
Tower Semiconductor (NASDAQ: TSEM) is the pick-and-shovel play. It is a specialty foundry that manufactures wafers based on designs from other companies, meaning investors do not have to guess which transceiver vendor will win.
Its silicon photonics business has grown from a rounding error into a major growth engine, and management raised its long-term targets on the back of that growth. Tower has locked in more than a billion dollars of 2027 photonics contracts, with customer prepayments already in hand. That is demand booked before the capacity exists.
What Could Break the Setup
The doomsday scenario is that regulation kills AI demand. Bodner does not buy it, and adoption data supports his view.
The real risk is capital intensity. Tower is committing billions of its own money to a Japan expansion, and heavy capital expenditures can outrun actual demand if photonics adoption slows. Memory has broken investors' hearts before. These three stocks trade on the assumption that tightness will persist, and the same forces that lifted the group could unwind it together.
Watch supply commitments and customer prepayments rather than safety headlines. Those are the factors actually moving these three stocks.
Readers can get Jason Bodner's MoneyFlows institutional money flow research at its discounted annual rate and track where the big money is moving next.
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