After a 20% Rally, Is Salesforce Stock Still Attractive?

On the Aug. 31, 2026, episode of The Morning Filter podcast, hosts Susan Dziubinski and Morningstar Chief US Market Strategist Dave Sekera discuss Salesforce CRM stock’s postearnings pop. Here is an excerpt from the show.

What Made Salesforce’s Stock Pop?

Susan Dziubinski: Salesforce shot up more than 20% after earnings last week. What drove that pop in the stock?

David Sekera: I think it’s like what we talked about last week, and I think the market saw what we wanted to see. I mean, it was a solid quarter, and again, they just put in quarter after quarter of that solid top-line growth. In this case, revenue was up 11%, which is toward the upper end of the guidance that management’s provided in the past. But even more encouragingly, I think we’re seeing more and more signals regarding demand and adoption of their AI products. In fact, we’re looking for more revenue acceleration in the second half of the year.

So I think it’s just a matter of the market’s finally coming around to our view that AI is not going to totally displace the software sector. Software companies are using AI to become more economically value-added to their clients.

And so I think it’s really exemplified in this quote from our equity analyst, “Claudeforce, the newly announced anthropic partnership reinforces Salesforce strategy of serving as the governed data and workflow layer underneath multiple AI models and interfaces. Customers will be able to use Claude on top of Salesforce without replacing Salesforce as the system of record.”

Is Salesforce Stock Still Attractive?

Dziubinski: Salesforce was a pick of yours on the June 29 episode of The Morning Filter, and it’s up more than 50% since then, so you’re looking pretty good on this one, Dave. Morningstar assigns the stock a $280 fair value estimate. Is Salesforce stock still attractive?

Sekera: Well, first of all, I’m not looking good on this one, Susan. I would say our analyst and our analyst team are looking pretty good on this one.

Dziubinski: Fair enough.

Sekera: The stock’s only trading at a 7% discount, only has seven-tenths of a percent dividend yield. So it’s a 3-star-rated stock, but in my mind, it may not yet be time to start selling this one. It’s still below fair value, still very good strong upward momentum. I think a lot of investors out there probably underown software names. And if the company continues along the trajectory that it’s on, personally, I wouldn’t be surprised to see some fair value increases coming over the next couple of quarters. That’s just purely my own speculation at this point.

Having said all that, earnings-growth rate in our model, our five-year compound annual growth rate is 13%, so pretty strong, but the stock’s now trading at 18.5 times our 2026 earnings estimate. The stock price and the valuation are starting to get pretty full. It’s not nearly as cheap as it was, but again, this is one of those cases I think you maybe kind of just let the momentum continue to keep working for you for a while here. Let it go further into that overvalued territory before you start doing any profit-taking, but just my own opinion.

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