Waste Services Surges on Volume Spike

BURLINGTON, Ontario (TheStreet) -- Waste Services (WSII Quote) shares jumped Wednesday on above-average volume after the waste disposal company reported better-than-expected earnings for the third quarter.

Waste Services said late Tuesday it had third-quarter earnings of 15 cents a share, nearly doubling from the year-ago quarter to beat the Thomson Reuters average estimate of 11 cents a share. Revenue slipped 10% from a year ago to $112.5 million, in line with the single analyst estimate of $112.1 million.

Shares of Waste Services were rising by 59 cents, or 11%, to $5.95. Earlier in the session, the stock touched an intraday high of $6.13. More than 70,000 shares changed hands in the first 20 minutes of trading Wednesday, compared to the stock's 50-day average daily volume of 100,000, according to the Nasdaq.

Waste Services has a 41.5 million-share float with a short interest float of 1% as of Sept. 25, according to Yahoo! Finance. Insiders hold 37.5% of the company's shares with another 29.9% owned by institutions.

Investors posting on Internet message boards noted that nearly 1.3 million shares of Waste Services changed hands on Oct. 20 as the stock jumped 9.2%. Some traders speculated that volume spike was due to a new institutional buyer taking a position ahead of Tuesday's earnings report.

-- Written by Robert Holmes in New York.

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