5 Best Debt-Free S&P 500 Stocks to Buy Now

3. F5, Inc. (NASDAQ:FFIV)

On May 26, 2026, Barclays raised the firm’s price target on F5, Inc. (NASDAQ:FFIV) to $435 from $365 and maintained an Overweight rating on the shares ahead of the company’s investor day on May 28. Barclays said the underlying drivers for F5 are accelerating as its portfolio becomes more critical for enterprise customers adopting hybrid-cloud environments.

On May 19, 2026, RBC Capital analyst Matthew Hedberg raised the firm’s price target on F5, Inc. (NASDAQ:FFIV) to $425 from $375 and maintained an Outperform rating on the shares. Hedberg said F5 is in the early innings of a multi-quarter hardware “refresh plus” cycle, amplified by growing AI workloads. RBC also said AI could help drive above-trend software growth and expects these areas to be a focus of F5’s May 28 analyst day.

Last month, F5, Inc. (NASDAQ:FFIV) reported fiscal Q2 adjusted EPS of $3.90, ahead of the consensus estimate of $3.44. Revenue totaled $811.7M, above the consensus estimate of $779.38M. Chairman, President, and CEO Francois Locoh-Donou said revenue grew 11% year-over-year to $812 million, driven by 22% product revenue growth, marking the company’s seventh straight quarter of double-digit product growth. Locoh-Donou also cited demand tied to hybrid multicloud adoption, cybersecurity threats, and an inflection in AI inference.

F5, Inc. (NASDAQ:FFIV) provides multicloud application security and delivery solutions in the United States, Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and the Asia Pacific region.

1281292 - 11759070 - 1