Citi price target lowered to $87 from $88 at Oppenheimer

Oppenheimer lowered the firm’s price target on Citi to $87 from $88 and keeps an Outperform rating on the shares. While Citi has some headwinds to earnings, the firm thinks that expectations have been beaten down so low, and progress on expenses sufficient that the probabilities are very high that they will beat street expectations in the coming year or two. After a long period of guiding that the “cost curve” would “bend” between Q3 and Q4 2024, management effectively said it had bent already and that costs would be sequentially lower from here for the next few quarters. This “cost curve bending” guidance had always struck Oppenheimer as “a bit wonky: How much would it bend? And from what baseline?”