NEW YORK, June 27, 2026, 16:03 EDT
- Palo Alto Networks closed at $304.20, rising 3.7%. The company is now valued at $243.7 billion.
- The stock rose 6.2% in the past five days, while the Nasdaq Composite dropped 4.6%.
- Palo Alto Networks’ dollar-value gain Friday beat the combined moves in CrowdStrike, Fortinet and Zscaler, based on quoted prices and market values.
- The Nasdaq market will be closed July 3 for the Independence Day holiday, cutting the coming week short.
U.S. stocks were closed Saturday. Palo Alto Networks, Inc. NASDAQ:PANW was one of the big software names standing out in a slow tech market. The stock finished at $304.20, up 3.7%. Volume was at 8.27 million shares, giving it a $243.7 billion market cap.
Nasdaq Composite ended Friday at 25,297.62, slipping 0.24% for the day and falling 4.6% across the week. Palo Alto finished up 6.2% for the week, moving against the drop in other AI-tied tech stocks.
Palo Alto’s move Friday wasn’t just about the percentage. Based on market cap and price changes, Palo Alto picked up roughly $8.7 billion in equity value. CrowdStrike Holdings, Inc. NASDAQ:CRWD, Fortinet, Inc. NASDAQ:FTNT and Zscaler, Inc. NASDAQ:ZS together gained about $7.9 billion. Zscaler’s percentage jump was bigger than the others, but its market cap boost wasn’t the largest.
Palo Alto isn’t trading like a smaller, high-beta cyber stock any more. Now a small move in PANW shifts more dollars than bigger swings in lower-cap security software names. Funds tracking software, the cloud security space or the Nasdaq are more exposed to risks tied to Palo Alto’s AI-security bets and dealmaking.
Palo Alto and IBM NYSE:IBM announced a new step in Project Lightwell on June 24. The companies said they will bring together Palo Alto’s Virtual Patching with IBM and Red Hat software fixes, targeting open-source and commercial software, OT and healthcare tech.
“Traditional patching cannot keep pace,” Chief Executive Nikesh Arora said, pointing out that AI now shrinks the time from vulnerability discovery to exploit “from weeks to minutes.” IBM CEO Arvind Krishna said the effort brings security “directly to the network front lines.” IBM Newsroom
Cantor Fitzgerald’s Jonathan Ruykhaver kept his Overweight rating on Palo Alto and stuck to his $340 price target Friday. That price is above Palo Alto’s latest quote of $304.20. The MarketWatch analyst snapshot lists an average target of $320.25, a median of $330 and a high at $375.
Palo Alto’s main scenario is still based on results from the June 2 quarter. The company reported fiscal Q3 revenue up 31% to $3.0 billion, with $388 million of that from CyberArk and Chronosphere. Next-generation security ARR was up 60% to $8.1 billion. Remaining performance obligation climbed 36% to $18.4 billion.
Palo Alto CFO Dipak Golechha said the company is “ahead of our M&A integration plans.” Palo Alto sees fiscal 2026 revenue in the range of $11.415 billion to $11.425 billion and non-GAAP EPS between $3.77 and $3.79. Palo Alto Networks
Old tech is still driving the AI trade. On the earnings call, Golechha said hardware made up about 10% of revenue and had its strongest quarter in ten years, with next-generation firewall bookings climbing almost 40%. Product revenue had 46% recurring software over the last 12 months, up from 22% three years ago.
PANW trades at a P/E close to 290, quote data shows, with Fortinet at around 59. CrowdStrike and Zscaler both still report negative earnings in the feed. There’s not much room in the valuation now.
Next week will be a shortened one. Nasdaq has Friday, July 3 shut for Independence Day observed, and Palo Alto’s investor schedule has nothing listed after the June 2 earnings call. That puts focus on analyst notes, sector flows in cyber, and whatever else comes out of Lightwell.
