Following The Money: Institution’s Growing Stake In Unitedhealth Group Inc (NYSE: UNH)

BlackRock Fund Advisors has recently announced that it has increased stake in Unitedhealth Group Inc (NYSE:UNH) by 0.40%. After grabbing 44.43 million shares, the institutional investor is now in possession of 0.17 million shares of the Healthcare Company. The new investment brought the stake of investor firm to 4.80% having worth around $24.57 billion. Moreover, Wellington Management Co. LLP increased its share by 0.53 million to have a control over 25.22 million shares. And Geode Capital Management LLC raised its holdings to 0.32 million shares by acquiring 17.87 million shares or 1.93% of the stake.

Unitedhealth Group Inc (UNH) concluded trading on 01/04/24 at a closing price of $545.42, with 2.99 million shares of worth about $1.63 billion changed hands on the day. Half year performance of the stock remained positive as price took a surge of 16.21% during that period and on Thursday the price saw a gain of about 0.63%. Currently the company’s common shares owned by public are about 934.00M shares, out of which, 923.30M shares are available for trading.

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A deeper look into what the analysts at Wall Street are thinking about the price target of this stock provides us with the following: 27 analysts are covering the UNH stock and their offered price forecasts bring an average price target of $600.13. Over the next 12 months, analysts forecasted that the stock’s price could jump as high as $675.00 and could fall to a lowest price of $480.00. The stock’s current price level is 8.27% above of average price target set by the analysts, while a rise to estimated low would result in loss of -13.63% for the stock. However, touching the estimated high of $675.00 would mean a gain of 19.2% for the stock.

According to filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), insiders took part in trade of the company’s stock for 163 times over the past 12 months. They bought 270,625 shares in 114 of the transactions. In 49 selling transactions, insiders dumped 318,196 shares.

Vanguard Total Stock Market ETF, Vanguard 500 Index Fund, and Fidelity 500 Index Fund are the top 3 mutual funds which are holding stakes in Unitedhealth Group Inc Vanguard Total Stock Market ETF is currently holding 29.04 million shares of worth totaling $16.06 billion. The company recently came buying 40082.0 shares which brought its stake up to 3.14% of the company’s outstanding shares. Vanguard 500 Index Fund bought 0.11 million shares, after which its hold over company’s outstanding shares expand to 2.42%, leaving 22.37 million shares with the mutual fund that have a worth of about $12.37 billion. Fidelity 500 Index Fund, after buying 10.73 million shares, have now control over 1.16% of the stake in the company. It holds 85444.0 shares of worth $5.93 billion.

Unitedhealth Group Inc (NYSE: UNH) started trading at $545.00, above $2.97 from concluding price of the previous day. However, the stock later moved at a day high price of 549.00, or with a gain of 0.63%. Stock saw a price change of 4.33% in past 5 days and over the past one month there was a price change of -0.52%. Year-to-date (YTD), UNH shares are showing a performance of 3.60% which increased to 5.16% when we look at its performance for past 12 months. Over the period of past 52 weeks, stock dropped to lowest price of $445.68 but also hit the highest price of $554.70 during that period. The average intraday trading volume for Unitedhealth Group Inc shares is 2.85 million. The stock is currently trading 2.10% above its 20-day simple moving average (SMA20), while that difference is up 1.77% for SMA50 and it goes to 8.28% higher than SMA200.

BlackRock Fund Advisors acquired 44.43 million shares of Unitedhealth Group Inc having value of about $24.57 billion. Data submitted at the U.S SEC by BlackRock Fund Advisors revealed that the firm now holds 0.17 million shares in the company valued at close to $95356324.02, or have control over 0.40% stake in the company. Unitedhealth Group Inc (NYSE: UNH) currently have 934.00M outstanding shares and institutions hold larger chunk of about 88.88% of that. Holding of mutual funds in the company is about 37.19% while other institutional holders and individual stake holders have control over 52.18% and 1.79% of the stake respectively.

The stock has a current market capitalization of $504.47B and its 3Y-monthly beta is at 0.55. PE ratio of stock for trailing 12 months is 23.67, while it has posted earnings per share of $23.04 in the same period. Its PEG reads 1.86 while making debt-to-equity ratio of 0.75. Volatility of a stock is a metric used to know how much the price of that stock is under influence and for UNH, volatility over the week remained 1.34% while standing at 1.36% over the month.

Analysts are in expectations that Unitedhealth Group Inc (UNH) stock would likely to be making an EPS of $5.98 in the current quarter, while forecast for next quarter EPS is $6.87 and it is $27.9 for next year. For the current quarter EPS, analysts have given the company a lowest target $5.9 which is $6.03 at the higher side of the target for the same. When we compare those targets with actual EPS, we find that company posted an EPS of $5.34 in the same quarter a year ago. Stock’s fiscal year EPS is expected to rise by 12.48% while it is estimated to increase by 11.69% in next year. EPS is likely to shrink at an annualized rate of 12.74% for next 5-years, compared to annual growth of 14.59% made by the stock over the past 5-years.

Analysts at 27 brokerage firms have issued recommendations for the Unitedhealth Group Inc (UNH)’s stock and average of those rates the stock at a “Strong Buy” and assign it a score of 1.56. Out of those 27 Wall Street analysts, 20 recommended a “Buy” rating, while 5 were in favor recommending the stock as a “Hold” and 1 analyst recommended the stock as “Sell”.

Digging deeper we find that several firms have released their research notes about the support levels of the stock. Most recent of them is a note released by HSBC Securities on December 18, 2023 offering a Reduce rating for the stock and assigned a target price range of between $550 and $480 to it.

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