Today is a dark yet familiar day for IBM (NYSE:IBM). For the last nine sessions now, IBM has seen its share price rise for a variety of reasons. But today—unless something changes in a matter of minutes—IBM will end the day down, albeit fractionally, for the first time in the last nine sessions.
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IBM made steady advances, never picking up much, but never losing in that entire nine-day run, either. In fact, after those nine days had passed, IBM was up around 4.86%. Moreover, shares are actually approaching highs not seen since before the pandemic, back in January 2018. IBM also featured more gains than declines in all of November, with 15 sessions showing upward momentum and only six on the decline.
New Advancements (Should) Bring New Advances
So, what was the deal with IBM’s impressive upward momentum? And why did that momentum suddenly—if only slightly—stop today? Well, IBM has made quite a few noteworthy advancements in recent days. In fact, just recently, word emerged about IBM’s newest advances in quantum computing. That word featured plenty of advances, both current and forthcoming. It included new processors, new computing systems to put those processors to work, and even some new application programming interfaces (APIs) to help generate useful tools for those computers and processors.
IBM also rolled out something for the cryptocurrency market: the Offline Signing Applicator, a new kind of cold-storage technology that reduces risk to crypto assets kept in storage as opposed to actively traded. These tools might go quite some way to keeping IBM’s upward momentum going, something that’s been sorely needed as more firms entered its market over the last few decades.
Is IBM a Buy, Sell, or Hold?
Turning to Wall Street, analysts have a Moderate Buy consensus rating on IBM stock based on three Buys and six Holds assigned in the past three months, as indicated by the graphic below. After a 14.25% rally in its share price over the past year, the average IBM price target of $154.50 per share implies 3.58% downside risk.
