5 Best Security Stocks to Buy Now

4. NICE Ltd. (NASDAQ: NICE)

Number of Hedge Fund Holders: 33

NICE Ltd. (NASDAQ: NICE) is a provider of enterprise software solutions, and the company operates across the globe. It has two segments: Customer Engagement and Financial Crime and Compliance, and ranks 4th on our list of the best security stocks to buy now.

This June, NICE Ltd. (NASDAQ: NICE) was upgraded to Overweight from its previous Neutral rating with a $260 price target over at J.P. Morgan. The firm’s analyst Paul Coster has commented that they are expecting robust execution leading to upward revisions in estimates from the stock.

In the first quarter of 2021, NICE Ltd. (NASDAQ: NICE) had an EPS of $1.54, beating estimates by $0.04. The company’s revenue was $456.95 million, up 11.12% year over year and beating estimates by $6.34 million, and it has a gross profit margin of 66.34%. The stock has gained 36.33% in the past year.

As of the end of the first quarter of 2021, 33 hedge funds held stakes in NICE Ltd. (NASDAQ: NICE), worth roughly $868 million. This is compared to 26 hedge funds in the previous quarter with a total stake value of $726 million.

Artisan Partners Limited Partnership, a high value-added investment management firm, mentioned NICE Ltd. (NASDAQ: NICE) in its fourth-quarter 2020 investor letter. Here’s what they said:

“NICE is an Israeli software company that provides software for call centers, which combines omnichannel routing of customer inquiries (e.g., voice, text, email, social media) with analytics/AI, workforce management and robotic process automation (RPA). NICE has best-in-class software across each of these software categories and has a strong value proposition of both improving the customer experience of call center interactions while simultaneously reducing operating costs through automation, intelligence and flexibility. We believe the company should benefit from the ongoing transition to cloud computing, contributing to increased adoption of its analytics and AI solutions.”