McDonald's Stock Challenged By a Tougher Economy, Analyst Says. Plus, Marriott, Snowflake, and More. — Barrons.com

These reports, excerpted and edited by Barron's, were issued recently by investment and research firms. The reports are a sampling of analysts' thinking; they should not be considered the views or recommendations of Barron's. Some of the reports' issuers have provided, or hope to provide, investment-banking or other services to the companies being analyzed.

Targa Resources — TRGP-NYSE Buy — $160.46 on Nov. 5 by Seaport Research Partners Targa Resources reported a solid third-quarter beat driven by volume growth in the gathering & processing segment and also plans to come in at the high end of the previous fiscal-2025 adjusted Ebitda guidance. It also bought back about $156 million of stock during the quarter and announced a 25% dividend increase for 2026; we thus expect investors to view this update positively.

On the conference call, we expect the focus to be on: 1) recent trends in Permian volumes and initial outlook for 2026 activity, 2) capex plans for 2026 and subsequent years considering Targa's growth pipeline of projects, and 3) competitive pressures in the Permian basin and updated thoughts on capital allocation.

Price target: $193.

Bio-Techne — TECH-Nasdaq Buy — $61.10 on Nov. 5 by Benchmark Equity Research Bio-Techne reported below-expected financial results for its first-quarter 2026 (September), including revenue of $286.6 million, down 1% year over year, and flat adjusted earnings of $0.42 versus $0.42 for first-quarter 2025.

Our estimates had been revenue of $298 million, a 3% increase, and adjusted earnings per share of $0.46. Company management cited headwinds in its GMP proteins business and funding delays for its emerging biotech customers as reasons for the flat results. Bio-Techne did not provide financial guidance for upcoming quarters but may do so on its conference call.

We are maintaining our Buy rating on Bio-Techne shares and $75 price target on the long-term potential of the company's diversified life science product portfolio.

McDonald's — MCD-NYSE Hold — $304.83 on Nov. 5 by Stifel McDonald's reported relatively in-line comps, but earnings fell short as heavy marketing investments weighed on flow-through. While U.S. comps were up 2.4% (Stifel 2.5%, Street 2.0%)...transactions remain challenged. While management indicated that its efforts to reset consumers' value perception were moving the needle, a bifurcated consumer base with persistent pressures on lower-income consumers proved to be a considerable offset.

The company expects U.S. comps to accelerate in the fourth quarter, driven primarily by lapping last year's food safety incident, as well as support from the November Extra Value Meals promotions. While we are encouraged by the improving comp trends, it's difficult to parse the benefit of easier comparisons from the true impact of the current push to improve consumer value perception, keeping us on the sidelines. Price target: $315.

Docebo — DCBO-Nasdaq Outperform — $25.62 on Nov. 5 by Oppenheimer We are initiating coverage of Docebo, a leading provider of learning management systems, with an Outperform rating and $35 price target. Docebo has seen growth outpace the broader LMS market by displacing legacy vendors, moving upmarket, and extending into new markets. We see average revenue per user as a key growth driver with management prioritizing enterprise sales.

We also see potential for the push into the public sector to factor more meaningfully after achieving FedRAMP status in April 2025. As the business scales, we are also seeing improved operating leverage....We see attractive risk/reward with shares trading at 2.9 times calendar-year 2026 estimated enterprise value/sales and 15.4 times EV/free cash flow.

Marriott International — MAR-Nasdaq Neutral — $272.24 on Nov. 5 by Mizuho Third-quarter upside and relatively conservative fourth-quarter guide is overall neutral/slightly positive, as fourth-quarter weakness was largely baked into the stock, with the third quarter being a surprise positive. The 2026 preliminary outlook reflects a similar growth algo vs. 2025, which we feel is reassuring, given the macro uncertainty. In essence, lodging (and Marriott specifically) is not particularly crowded, and has an easy path to growth next year (which is attractive in the context of broader consumer discretionary). We maintain our Neutral rating and believe the risk/reward is fairly balanced. Price target: $297.

Snowflake — SNOW-NYSE Outperform — $265.42 on Nov. 5 by Evercore ISI At Snowflake's annual developer and product conference, the key message was Snowflake's evolution from a "Data Cloud" to an "Enterprise Intelligence Cloud"....Altogether, the event reinforced that Snowflake's future growth will hinge on helping customers build and reason with their data, not just store it....

The "top five" product announcements underscored that narrative, including: 1) the general availability launch of Snowflake Intelligence, enabling natural-language access and agentic workflows across structured and unstructured data; 2) expanded Cortex AI capabilities, adding multimodal model support...and tighter model governance; 3) the introduction of Snowflake Notebooks, a native environment for developers to prototype data and AI workflows without leaving the platform; 4) new Native App Framework enhancements, allowing customers and partners to build, distribute, and monetize data-driven apps directly within Snowflake's Marketplace; and 5) deeper integration of unstructured data and vector search, making it easier for enterprises to build retrieval-augmented and AI-powered applications on top of their existing datasets.

Price target: $280.

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