Oppenheimer upgrades Blackstone on ‘pretty darn good’ entry point

Oppenheimer analyst Christopher Kotowski upgraded Blackstone to Outperform from Perform with a $111 price target. The shares are down 43% from their November 2021 high, but the company’s fee paying assets under management are 36% higher and in Q4 of 2022, fee related earnings were 36% above Q3 of 2021, the analyst tells investors in a research note. "Who knows if this is the perfect entry point, but it looks pretty darn good to us," writes the firm. It says the alternative asset managers have perhaps the best liability structure in the financial world, while SVB Financial had perhaps the worst. For the alternatives, the capital is pooled in dozens of different structured vehicles from which capital can only be moved after a realization event at the direction of the sponsor, Opco notes.