We recently published a list of 10 Stocks in Wall Street’s Watchlist. In this article, we are going to take a look at where Palo Alto Networks, Inc. (NASDAQ:PANW) stands against other stocks in Wall Street’s watchlist.

Dan Niles, Niles Investment Management founder, in a latest program on CNBC reiterated his concerns about a slowdown in AI spending and said that major technology companies were already facing the impact of a downbeat trend in the industry before the tariff wars started:

“When the MAG 7 reported the December quarter or calendar Q4, six of the seven had their March revenue estimates already cut. So think about that for a second. But the thing is, when the Fed’s cutting like it was last year, nobody cares, right? If the stocks are going up, the charts look good. Why worry about fundamentals or valuations?,” Niles said. “Because the stocks are going higher. So looking forward, I expect all the estimates to come down yet again for the June quarter. When these companies report the March quarter, they were already having troubles when they reported the December quarter before all this tariff stuff kicked in.”

Niles said that companies were buying more ahead of the China tariffs because they expected that duties were coming from the US.

“You can just see that from the China export data already, where for China as a whole, in the month of March, exports were up 12.4%. People were expecting 4.6%. So that’s a massive beat there. And so you can already tell demand’s being pulled forward. So my thought was there was a payback period coming anyway.”

For this article, we picked 10 stocks Wall Street analysts have been talking about lately. With each stock, we have mentioned its hedge fund sentiment. Why are we interested in the stocks that hedge funds pile into? The reason is simple: our research has shown that we can outperform the market by imitating the top stock picks of the best hedge funds. Our quarterly newsletter’s strategy selects 14 small-cap and large-cap stocks every quarter and has returned 373.4% since May 2014, beating its benchmark by 218 percentage points (see more details here).

Palo Alto Networks, Inc. (NASDAQ:PANW)

Number of Hedge Fund Investors: 64

Stephanie Link, Hightower Advisors CIO, explained in a latest program on CNBC why she’s buying Palo Alto Networks, Inc. (NASDAQ:PANW).

“Palo Alto is a fairly new position. I only started buying it about a month ago. It’s down 14% since I bought it. You know, I’m a big believer in cybersecurity, and these guys are a top-five player in the cybersecurity sector. They are building out scale through platformization, which could be a $15 billion annualized recurring revenue opportunity for them.

I think the biggest thing is that it’s trading at 14 times price-to-sales, which is not cheap, but CrowdStrike is trading at 22 times. It’s recovered all of its valuation discount post the glitch that they had. So I sold CrowdStrike and bought Palo Alto.”

Overall, PANW ranks 7th on our list of stocks in Wall Street’s watchlist. While we acknowledge the potential of PANW, our conviction lies in the belief that AI stocks hold greater promise for delivering higher returns, and doing so within a shorter time frame. There is an AI stock that went up since the beginning of 2025, while popular AI stocks lost around 25%. If you are looking for an AI stock that is more promising than PANW but that trades at less than 5 times its earnings, check out our report about this cheapest AI stock.

READ NEXT: 20 Best AI Stocks To Buy Now and 30 Best Stocks to Buy Now According to Billionaires.

Disclosure: None. This article is originally published at Insider Monkey.