Tesco share price is rising today as investors forecast strong holiday and quarterly sales for the biggest retailer in the United Kingdom. The shares are trading at 246p, which is 21% higher than its lowest level last year.
What happened: This week, Sainsbury’s and Morrisons surprised investors when they published their holiday sales figures. The data showed that the two companies did extremely well than what most analysts were expecting.
Sainsbury’s expects the sales to boost its underlying profit by about £50 million to £330 million. Morrison, the giant supermarket chain, had a strong revenue growth of about 9.3% during the holiday season.
Therefore, Tesco share price is rising because investors believe that its sales were equally strong, boosted by its digital platforms. As the biggest supermarket chain in the country, they believe that its scale helped it to improve its sales. What next for Tesco: Analysts are generally optimistic about Tesco. Data compiled by Marketbeat shows that the average consensus for Tesco share price is 283p, which is about 40 points above the current level. Analysts bullish on the shares are from Shore Capital, Morgan Stanley, UBS, Berenberg, and Citi, among others.
On the daily chart, we see that Tesco shares have generally been rising in the past few weeks. This has led the 200-day and 50-day moving average to do what is known as a golden cross. It happened this week. Therefore, in the near term, the shares will possibly continue rising as bulls target the next resistance level at 260p, which was the highest point in May last year.
