VNET Group Sees Unusually Large Options Volume (NASDAQ:VNET)

VNET Group, Inc. (NASDAQ:VNET) was the target of some unusual options trading activity on Friday. Stock investors acquired 5,475 put options on the stock. This is an increase of approximately 26% compared to the average volume of 4,345 put options.

Hedge Funds Weigh In On VNET Group

Institutional investors have recently modified their holdings of the company. Connor Clark & Lunn Investment Management Ltd. acquired a new position in VNET Group during the third quarter worth approximately $199,000. Walleye Capital LLC acquired a new position in VNET Group during the third quarter worth approximately $115,000. Wolverine Trading LLC acquired a new stake in shares of VNET Group in the third quarter worth $46,000. XTX Topco Ltd acquired a new stake in shares of VNET Group in the third quarter worth $343,000. Finally, Anson Funds Management LP increased its position in shares of VNET Group by 84.9% in the third quarter. Anson Funds Management LP now owns 450,000 shares of the information technology services provider’s stock worth $1,836,000 after acquiring an additional 206,580 shares in the last quarter. Institutional investors and hedge funds own 72.83% of the company’s stock.

Analyst Upgrades and Downgrades

Several analysts have recently weighed in on VNET shares. Nomura Securities raised shares of VNET Group to a “strong-buy” rating in a report on Friday, February 21st. UBS Group lifted their target price on shares of VNET Group from $6.40 to $7.00 and gave the company a “buy” rating in a report on Friday, November 29th. The Goldman Sachs Group upgraded shares of VNET Group from a “neutral” rating to a “buy” rating and raised their price objective for the company from $3.10 to $5.00 in a research note on Friday, November 29th. Finally, Citigroup raised their price objective on shares of VNET Group from $16.10 to $20.00 and gave the company a “buy” rating in a research note on Friday. One investment analyst has rated the stock with a hold rating, five have issued a buy rating and two have given a strong buy rating to the company’s stock. Based on data from MarketBeat.com, the company presently has a consensus rating of “Buy” and an average price target of $7.98.

VNET Group Price Performance

Shares of NASDAQ VNET traded up $1.29 during midday trading on Friday, hitting $11.69. The company had a trading volume of 8,875,509 shares, compared to its average volume of 9,922,611. The company has a quick ratio of 0.83, a current ratio of 0.83 and a debt-to-equity ratio of 1.46. VNET Group has a twelve month low of $1.42 and a twelve month high of $16.13. The business has a 50-day simple moving average of $9.09 and a two-hundred day simple moving average of $5.51. The firm has a market capitalization of $3.01 billion, a price-to-earnings ratio of -5.26, a price-to-earnings-growth ratio of 1.01 and a beta of 0.06.

VNET Group (NASDAQ:VNET) last announced its earnings results on Wednesday, March 12th. The information technology services provider reported ($0.01) earnings per share (EPS) for the quarter, missing analysts’ consensus estimates of $0.03 by ($0.04). The business had revenue of $307.75 million for the quarter, compared to analyst estimates of $284.88 million. VNET Group had a negative return on equity of 5.68% and a negative net margin of 28.54%. Equities research analysts anticipate that VNET Group will post -0.06 earnings per share for the current year.

About VNET Group

VNET Group, Inc, an investment holding company, provides hosting and related services in China. It offers managed hosting services consisting of managed retail services, such as colocation services that dedicate data center space to house customers' servers and networking equipment, as well as allow customers to lease partial or entire cabinets for their servers; interconnectivity services that allow customers to connect their servers; value-added services, including hybrid IT, bare metal, firewall, server load balancing, data backup and recovery, data center management, server management, and backup server services; cloud services that allow customers to run applications over the internet using IT infrastructure; and VPN Services that extend customers' private networks by setting up connections through the public internet.