Salesforce Sees Unusually High Options Volume (NYSE:CRM)

Salesforce Inc. (NYSE:CRM) was the target of some unusual options trading on Wednesday. Traders acquired 253,387 call options on the stock. This represents an increase of approximately 171% compared to the average volume of 93,447 call options.

Key Salesforce News

Here are the key news stories impacting Salesforce this week:

• Positive Sentiment: Analyst upgrade: Mizuho raised its price target from $265 to $280 and assigned an “outperform” rating, citing a more favorable 2026 setup following Dreamforce. Salesforce gets fresh target hike from Mizuho after Dreamforce
• Positive Sentiment: AI product momentum: Salesforce unveiled Koa, a CRM reasoning model developed with NVIDIA and built on NVIDIA Nemotron, to support complex Agentforce workflows. The company also introduced AIforce and announced expanded partnerships with OpenAI, AWS, Siemens and other vendors. These initiatives could improve AI adoption and strengthen Salesforce’s enterprise distribution advantage. Announcing Koa
• Positive Sentiment: Buyback support: Jim Cramer said Salesforce’s $25 billion share-repurchase program is looking increasingly attractive and argued that the issues weighing on investor sentiment have largely passed. Salesforce’s $25 Billion Buyback
• Positive Sentiment: Usage growth: Slackbot users reportedly rose more than 150% sequentially, suggesting growing customer engagement with Salesforce’s AI tools and potential support for future bookings. Slackbot Users Jump 150%
• Neutral Sentiment: Salesforce’s strong recent earnings, including better-than-expected profit and roughly 11% year-over-year revenue growth, provide financial support, but investors remain focused on whether AI products can accelerate growth and cash flow.
• Negative Sentiment: Service disruption: A widespread outage caused severe delays, intermittent errors or inability to access parts of Salesforce’s cloud suite during Dreamforce. The timing raises concerns about platform reliability, customer satisfaction and execution, making it the clearest immediate pressure on CRM shares. Salesforce Service Outages Strike on Day 2 of Dreamforce
• Negative Sentiment: Some analysts question whether Salesforce’s elevated valuation is justified while free-cash-flow growth slows and most sales and service customers have not yet upgraded to premium AI-enabled editions.

Salesforce Price Performance

Shares of NYSE:CRM traded down $5.01 during trading on Wednesday, reaching $250.64. 9,302,866 shares of the company’s stock traded hands, compared to its average volume of 13,999,823. The company has a quick ratio of 0.84, a current ratio of 0.84 and a debt-to-equity ratio of 1.02. Salesforce has a fifty-two week low of $146.32 and a fifty-two week high of $269.11. The company has a 50-day simple moving average of $204.13 and a 200-day simple moving average of $188.20. The firm has a market cap of $206.27 billion, a PE ratio of 22.85, a P/E/G ratio of 1.18 and a beta of 1.20.

Salesforce (NYSE:CRM) last released its quarterly earnings results on Wednesday, August 26th. The CRM provider reported $5.90 earnings per share for the quarter, topping analysts’ consensus estimates of $3.27 by $2.63. Salesforce had a return on equity of 24.90% and a net margin of 21.99%.The company had revenue of $11.35 billion during the quarter, compared to analysts’ expectations of $11.33 billion. During the same quarter in the prior year, the firm posted $2.91 EPS. Salesforce’s quarterly revenue was up 10.8% compared to the same quarter last year. Salesforce has set its FY 2027 guidance at 16.670-16.710 EPS and its Q3 2027 guidance at 3.420-3.440 EPS. As a group, analysts predict that Salesforce will post 12.83 earnings per share for the current year.

Salesforce Dividend Announcement

The business also recently disclosed a quarterly dividend, which will be paid on Thursday, October 8th. Shareholders of record on Thursday, September 17th will be given a dividend of $0.44 per share. The ex-dividend date is Thursday, September 17th. This represents a $1.76 dividend on an annualized basis and a yield of 0.7%. Salesforce’s dividend payout ratio is currently 16.04%.

Insiders Place Their Bets

In other news, Director Craig Conway sold 4,500 shares of the stock in a transaction dated Friday, September 4th. The stock was sold at an average price of $260.61, for a total value of $1,172,745.00. Following the transaction, the director directly owned 5,437 shares of the company’s stock, valued at approximately $1,416,936.57. This represents a 45.29% decrease in their ownership of the stock. The sale was disclosed in a document filed with the Securities & Exchange Commission, which is accessible through the SEC website. Insiders own 3.50% of the company’s stock.

Institutional Inflows and Outflows

Hedge funds and other institutional investors have recently bought and sold shares of the stock. Commonwealth Retirement Investments LLC purchased a new stake in shares of Salesforce during the fourth quarter worth approximately $25,000. ABS Direct Equity Fund LLC acquired a new stake in Salesforce during the 2nd quarter worth $25,000. Manning & Napier Advisors LLC acquired a new stake in Salesforce during the 2nd quarter worth $26,000. Persistent Asset Partners Ltd purchased a new stake in shares of Salesforce during the second quarter worth $27,000. Finally, Costello Asset Management INC raised its position in shares of Salesforce by 410.3% in the first quarter. Costello Asset Management INC now owns 148 shares of the CRM provider’s stock valued at $28,000 after buying an additional 119 shares during the last quarter. 80.43% of the stock is owned by hedge funds and other institutional investors.

Wall Street Analysts Forecast Growth

CRM has been the topic of several research reports. Royal Bank Of Canada increased their price target on shares of Salesforce from $210.00 to $250.00 and gave the stock a “sector perform” rating in a report on Thursday, August 27th. Susquehanna assumed coverage on shares of Salesforce in a report on Wednesday, July 1st. They issued a “neutral” rating on the stock. Evercore reissued an “outperform” rating on shares of Salesforce in a report on Thursday, August 27th. Wedbush assumed coverage on shares of Salesforce in a report on Wednesday, July 1st. They issued an “outperform” rating on the stock. Finally, Barclays increased their price target on Salesforce from $236.00 to $276.00 and gave the stock an “overweight” rating in a research report on Thursday, August 27th. Three analysts have rated the stock with a Strong Buy rating, twenty-eight have assigned a Buy rating, fourteen have issued a Hold rating and three have issued a Sell rating to the stock. According to data from MarketBeat, Salesforce currently has a consensus rating of “Moderate Buy” and an average price target of $267.50.

About Salesforce

Salesforce, Inc is a cloud-based software company that provides customer relationship management (CRM) technology and related enterprise applications. Its platform helps organizations manage sales, customer service, marketing, commerce, data analytics and business operations through subscription-based software and cloud services.

The company’s product portfolio includes Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud, Commerce Cloud, Data Cloud and the Salesforce Platform. Salesforce also offers Slack for workplace collaboration, Tableau for data visualization and analytics, MuleSoft for application integration, and artificial intelligence capabilities, including its Agentforce platform for building and deploying AI agents.

Founded in 1999, Salesforce is headquartered in San Francisco, California, and serves businesses and organizations across a broad range of industries and geographic markets worldwide.