Shares of  (NYSE: IBM) were on the rise on Wednesday, up as much as 3.7% before settling in to a 2.8% gain as of 1:05 p.m. ET. The reason for IBM's rise was a rare outperform rating given on the stock in a new initiation by a Wall Street sell-side equity analyst.

Investors and Wall Street seem to have been lulled into a pessimistic take on IBM after years of seeing its business disrupted by Silicon Valley cloud companies. But following the company's massive acquisition of open-source software giant Red Hat in 2019 and the appointment of new CEO Arvind Krishna in 2020, it appears at least one analyst is willing to issue a fresh and more optimistic take.

Today, analyst Matthew Swanson of Wall Street firm RBC Capital initiated IBM with an outperform rating (just the eighth analyst out of 26 with the equivalent of a buy rating) and a $188 price target, which is a street-high target on Big Blue.

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Source Fool.com