F5 (NASDAQ:FFIV) Stock: Insider Kunal Anand Sells 1,989 Shares

F5, Inc. (NASDAQ:FFIV) CTO Kunal Anand sold 1,989 shares of the firm’s stock in a transaction that occurred on Tuesday, November 3rd. The stock was sold at an average price of $324.06, for a total transaction of $644,555.34. Following the sale, the chief technology officer directly owned 14,578 shares of the company’s stock, valued at approximately $4,724,146.68. The trade was a 12.01% decrease in their position. The transaction was disclosed in a filing with the SEC, which is available at this hyperlink. The transaction was executed under a pre-arranged Rule 10b5-1 trading plan.

F5 Price Performance

Shares of NASDAQ:FFIV traded down $17.98 during trading on Thursday, reaching $311.74. The stock had a trading volume of 1,380,704 shares, compared to its average volume of 751,325. The stock has a market capitalization of $17.65 billion, a PE ratio of 24.88, a P/E/G ratio of 2.94 and a beta of 1.07. The company has a debt-to-equity ratio of 0.23, a current ratio of 1.73 and a quick ratio of 1.59. F5, Inc. has a 52 week low of $223.76 and a 52 week high of $483.30. The business’s 50-day moving average price is $425.41 and its 200 day moving average price is $363.56.

F5 (NASDAQ:FFIV) last released its quarterly earnings results on Tuesday, October 27th. The network technology company reported $4.42 EPS for the quarter, topping analysts’ consensus estimates of $4.26 by $0.16. The business had revenue of $917.43 million for the quarter, compared to analyst estimates of $884.03 million. F5 had a return on equity of 21.00% and a net margin of 21.14%. F5’s revenue for the quarter was up 13.2% on a year-over-year basis. During the same period in the prior year, the company earned $4.39 EPS. As a group, equities analysts predict that F5, Inc. will post 14.19 earnings per share for the current year.

F5 declared that its Board of Directors has initiated a stock buyback plan on Tuesday, October 27th that allows the company to repurchase $1.50 billion in outstanding shares. This repurchase authorization allows the network technology company to buy shares of its stock through open market purchases. Stock repurchase plans are generally an indication that the company’s board believes its shares are undervalued.

Analyst Upgrades and Downgrades

A number of analysts have recently weighed in on FFIV shares. Zacks Research lowered F5 from a “strong-buy” rating to a “hold” rating in a research note on Monday, July 27th. Weiss Ratings downgraded shares of F5 from a “buy (b)” rating to a “buy (b-)” rating in a research report on Tuesday. Barclays reissued a “mixed” rating on shares of F5 in a report on Wednesday, October 28th. Royal Bank Of Canada raised their price objective on shares of F5 from $525.00 to $540.00 and gave the company an “outperform” rating in a research report on Wednesday, October 28th. Finally, Morgan Stanley raised their price objective on shares of F5 from $415.00 to $448.00 and gave the company an “equal weight” rating in a research report on Wednesday, October 28th. Four analysts have rated the stock with a Buy rating, seven have issued a Hold rating and one has issued a Sell rating to the stock. According to MarketBeat.com, the stock presently has a consensus rating of “Hold” and an average price target of $443.00.

Institutional Inflows and Outflows

Several large investors have recently bought and sold shares of the company. BlackRock Inc. bought a new stake in shares of F5 during the second quarter worth $2,611,637,000. William Blair Investment Management LLC acquired a new position in shares of F5 during the second quarter valued at $243,865,000. Hsbc Holdings PLC acquired a new position in shares of F5 during the second quarter valued at $208,277,000. Legal & General Group Plc acquired a new position in shares of F5 during the second quarter valued at $205,453,000. Finally, Deutsche Bank AG bought a new position in F5 in the second quarter valued at about $172,297,000. Institutional investors and hedge funds own 90.66% of the company’s stock.

About F5

F5, Inc (NASDAQ: FFIV) provides application delivery, security and traffic management solutions for enterprises, service providers and public-sector organizations. Its offerings are designed to help customers secure, optimize and manage applications and application programming interfaces (APIs) across data centers, private and public clouds, and edge environments.

The company’s portfolio includes BIG-IP software and appliances, NGINX application delivery and web server technologies, and F5 Distributed Cloud services.