Shares of Microsoft Corp. shot up 1.3% toward a record high in midday trade Thursday, after some upbeat comments by analysts ahead of the software giant’s fiscal second-quarter results due out next week. The stock was still below Wednesday’s all-time intraday high of $93.43, but was well above Tuesday’s record close of $91.90. J.P. Morgan analyst Mark Murphy raised his stock price target to $87 from $78. He said a survey of 30 Microsoft partners produced “healthy” results and had upbeat outlooks for 2018, and increasingly viewed Microsoft’s Azure cloud business has moving closer to parity with Amazon.com Inc.’s AWS in terms of technical capability and consumption. Separately, Canaccord Genuity analyst Richard Davis said it’s “reasonable” to expect Microsoft’s stock to appreciate between 10% and 20% a year for the next five years, which puts the company on a path to be the first trillion-dollar valued enterprise software stock. Microsoft is currently the third-most valuable company in the S&P 500 with a market capitalization of $717.3 billion. Microsoft’s stock has rallied 18.3% over the past three months, while the tech-heavy Nasdaq 100 has rallied 14.8% and the Dow Jones Industrial Average has climbed 13.3%.
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