Wall Street Is Warming to Boeing Stock. How High It Can Go.

A Southwest Airlines Boeing 737-700 plane. (Al Drago/Bloomberg)

Boeing stock ended lower Thursday, after catching an analyst upgrade earlier in the day and shares hitting new 52-week highs on Wednesday. Wall Street is feeling as good about shares of the commercial jet maker as it has in years.

The aerospace stock on Thursday traded as high as $235.23—pennies shy of a new 52-week intraday high—but closed down 1.1% at $231.27. The S&P 500 gained 0.1% and the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 0.7%. The early gains put Boeing shares on pace for another 52-week closing high.

Shares hit a new 52-week closing high of $233.88 on Wednesday. They also hit an intraday 52-week high of $235.27.

Boeing’s Thursday stock performance may have been helped by an upgrade from KGI Securities analyst Fan-Jen Tseng. He took his rating to Buy from Hold, though his reasoning wasn’t immediately clear. His price target is $266 a share, according to multiple ratings-aggregation sites.

Barron’s hasn’t seen a copy of the report. KGI didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Upgrades typically help stocks, but investors might not be as familiar with KGI, a Taiwan-based broker. In any case, Boeing shares have been strong lately, with a gain of 33% over the three months coming into Thursday trading.

Investors have gained confidence in Boeing’s efforts to improve quality and the manufacturing process.

Wall Street is feeling better, as well. Some 71% of analysts covering the company rate shares Buy, according to FactSet, while the average for companies in the S&P 500 is about 55%.

The current Buy-rating ratio is the highest since December 2023, the month before an emergency-door plug on an Alaska Air 737 MAX blew out, leaving a hole in the side of the jet in midflight. The problem, traced back to a manufacturing error, led to the Federal Aviation Administration setting limits on the number of planes Boeing could produce each month as it sought to improve its processes.

The average analyst price target for Boeing shares is now about $274, compared with about $183 at the start of 2025. Back then, only 52% of analysts rated the shares at Buy. The $274 mark is the highest since January 2024, according to FactSet.

Recent moves put $270 in play, according to Barron’s technical analyst Douglas Busch. He isn’t making a fundamental call on Boeing stock; his analysis is based on using stock charts and market history to understand investor sentiment.

Boeing stock should move next week because the company is scheduled to report its second-quarter earnings on Tuesday. Predicting the reaction to any one report is difficult. More important is what the company says about its efforts to turn itself around.

While shares notched 52-week highs this week, they are still well below the record of $446.01 reached in early March 2019, just before the second crash of a 737 MAX jet in less than five months. Both crashes were traced back to software and design issues.

Write to Al Root at allen.root@dowjones.com