Glaxosmithkline Share News (GSK)

(ShareCast News) - Exane BNP Paribas downgraded Daily Mail & General Trust to 'neutral' from 'outperform' and cut its price target to 850p from 920p.It noted the stock's recent rebound, which has seen it outperform the media sector by around 10% in the last month following a precipitous drop in July after its weak third-quarter trading update."While we continue to see DMGT as offering exposure to a number of attractive, structurally growing assets, we see downside risks to consensus for 2016/17 forecasts in a number of key 'high-multiple' assets including RMS, Euromoney, Mail Online and DMG events, and a lack of positive catalysts on the horizon."Still, it said the current valuation is not stretched versus peers, while EPS-accretive M&A or another buyback could offer some support going forward.The bank added that it expects Mail Online to miss its 2016 £100m revenue target. Pearson got a boost from a double upgrade on Monday, as both Investec and Kepler Cheuvreux raised their stances on the stock.Investec lifted the stock to 'add' from 'reduce' given the recent underperformance of the shares. It also noted good dividend yield support, at around 5%.Still, Investec said it continues to see mid-term pressure with limited evidence of positive structural/cyclical education drivers in numbers and flattish earnings per share growth in full-year 2016 despite extensive restructuring.The brokerage cut its price target to 1,125p from 1,250p given EPS downgrades and peer multiple compression.Kepler Cheuvreux also turned more positive on Pearson, upgrading it to 'buy' from 'hold' and raising the target price to 1,400p from 1,300p after it carried out a case study that showed a solid market share performance."The most frequent question we receive from investors is whether the broad loss of US state testing contracts (guided £100m revenue miss in 2016) could entail market losses for Pearson in the larger US K-12 school textbook and services market," said the Swiss-French brokerage."We have run an in-depth analysis of the purchases of the State of Texas, underpinning on the contrary solid, competitive performance even, after the loss of the testing contract was made public."It attributed the target price increase to higher-than-expected proceeds from the sale of the Financial Times and The Economist. Bank of America Merrill Lynch upgraded GlaxoSmithKline to 'neutral' from 'underperform' with an unchanged price target of 1,450p.It noted that the stock is now trading around 18% off its April highs and 8% below the bank's price target, offering approximately 14% total return with a dividend yield of around 6%.In addition, Merrill said that underlying earnings per share momentum may be bottoming. "Consensus EPS estimates for 2015/2016 are now broadly in line with ours, having fallen around 20% this year and having more than halved since early 2012."The bank also said 2017-2020 EPS growth is back in line with the sector at 9%, while pipeline activity will increase to end 2016."Albeit not the key driver of our upgrade, we see pipeline news flow of interest starting to pick up which, against a backdrop of low expectation could be a net positive," it said.Still, Merrill remains concerned about the company's balance sheet, which it said continued to be stretched, offering little strategic flexibility and presenting risk to the dividend beyond 2017.