Moody’s initiated with a Buy at BofA

BofA analyst Heather Balsky initiated coverage of Moody’s with a Buy rating and $400 price target. Market data companies have always offered highly recurring revenues and strong free cash flow, but what makes them especially attractive investments over the mid-term is their ability to accelerate growth by investing into increasing demand for digitized data and analytics, the analyst tells investors in a research note. The firm says Moody’s has high exposure to the likely credit issuance revival via its ratings business, but also a “very resilient” Analytics business.