Norfolk Southern price target lowered to $174 from $177 at Morgan Stanley

Morgan Stanley analyst Ravi Shanker lowered the firm’s price target on Norfolk Southern to $174 from $177 and keeps an Equal Weight rating on the shares. A "small" adjusted miss in Q1 EBIT "belies the noise in the quarter" resulting from the Ohio derailment that dominated the narrative, says the analyst, who notes that management believes service-related disruption costs will most likely persist into Q2 and "diminish" in the back half of the year. The near-term dust on the incident "may have settled (for now)," but macro issues raise the same challenges facing the rest of the space, the analyst added.