Piper Sandler analyst John Barnidge raised the firm's price target on Aflac to $130 from $125 and keeps an Overweight rating on the shares. The firm cites recent stock performance and the roll-forward of time. In general, Piper has slightly raised price targets for most of the insurance carriers and reduced price targets for some of the insurance brokers. Its analysis tends to be bottom-up in its approach and following first quarter results, the firm thinks it is probably wise to focus on the carriers over the insurance brokers since underwriting performance in general was a better help than expected for the carriers and organic growth results for the broker.
