Deutsche Bank Upgrades CrowdStrike to Buy With $300 Target, but Shares Fall 3.4% in Cybersecurity Selloff

Deutsche Bank analyst Brad Zelnick upgraded CRWD to Buy from Hold on November 2 and raised his price target to $300 from $240. His thesis is that investors underappreciate how much wider use of AI will expand the market for cybersecurity: he said CrowdStrike's own estimate of a $565 billion total addressable market by 2034 could prove conservative, and that the company could reach its $10 billion annual recurring revenue goal for fiscal 2030 earlier than planned while sustaining annual growth above 20% for several years.

The upgrade landed on a busy day for the company. CrowdStrike announced an expanded partnership under which CoreWeave brings Falcon platform protection and 24/7 managed security to its AI cloud customers, and TheStreet noted a separate set of three integrations with Dynatrace's AI observability platform. None of the coverage ties the CoreWeave deal to Deutsche Bank's call; the two were simply announced the same morning.

The stock did not follow the upgrade. CrowdStrike slid about 3% early in the session as Fortinet fell 3% and Palo Alto 2% in a sector-wide cybersecurity selloff; it closed at $241.81, down 3.44% from Friday's $250.43 close. 24/7 Wall St pointed to profit-taking after a run that had the shares up 107% year to date, and CoreWeave itself closed down 8.60% on the day.

What to watch: CrowdStrike's next earnings report in early December, where TheStreet said Wall Street expects adjusted EPS of $0.31 on revenue of $1.53 billion, and whether ARR growth supports the bank's view that the fiscal 2030 target can come early.