Altria Group (MO) Is Today's Unusual Social Activity Stock
Editor's Note: Any reference to TheStreet Ratings and its underlying recommendation does not reflect the opinion of TheStreet, Inc. or any of its contributors including Jim Cramer or Stephanie Link.
Trade-Ideas LLC identified
(
) as an unusual social activity candidate. In addition to specific proprietary factors, Trade-Ideas identified Altria Group as such a stock due to the following factors:
- MO has more that 20x the normal benchmarked social activity for this time of the day compared to its average of 16.26 mentions/day.
- MO has an average dollar-volume (as measured by average daily share volume multiplied by share price) of $299.1 million.
Identifying stocks with 'Unusual Social Activity' tends to be a valuable process for traders looking to capitalize on the 'talk of the town' stocks that are basking in far more attention from the StockTwits financial community than normal. Good press? Bad press? It ultimately doesn't matter if it's good or bad if you know how to trade around the sentiment. Certain hedge funds use such data for their proprietary algorithms and it is not uncommon to see shared social sentiment play itself out in a stock's price trend.
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More details on MO:
Altria Group, Inc., through its subsidiaries, manufactures and sells cigarettes, smokeless products, and wine in the United States and internationally. The stock currently has a dividend yield of 3.7%. MO has a PE ratio of 22.1. Currently there are 5 analysts that rate Altria Group a buy, no analysts rate it a sell, and 4 rate it a hold.
The average volume for Altria Group has been 6.6 million shares per day over the past 30 days. Altria Group has a market cap of $111.3 billion and is part of the consumer goods sector and tobacco industry. The stock has a beta of 0.68 and a short float of 0.6% with 2.27 days to cover. Shares are up 14.6% year-to-date as of the close of trading on Tuesday.
Analysis:
rates Altria Group as a
. The company's strengths can be seen in multiple areas, such as its revenue growth, notable return on equity, expanding profit margins, good cash flow from operations and solid stock price performance. We feel these strengths outweigh the fact that the company has had generally high debt management risk by most measures that we evaluated.
Highlights from the ratings report include:
- The revenue growth came in higher than the industry average of 23.1%. Since the same quarter one year prior, revenues slightly increased by 4.7%. Growth in the company's revenue appears to have helped boost the earnings per share.
- Powered by its strong earnings growth of 162.50% and other important driving factors, this stock has surged by 58.26% over the past year, outperforming the rise in the S&P 500 Index during the same period. Turning to the future, naturally, any stock can fall in a major bear market. However, in almost any other environment, the stock should continue to move higher despite the fact that it has already enjoyed nice gains in the past year.
- ALTRIA GROUP INC reported significant earnings per share improvement in the most recent quarter compared to the same quarter a year ago. The company has demonstrated a pattern of positive earnings per share growth over the past two years. We feel that this trend should continue. During the past fiscal year, ALTRIA GROUP INC increased its bottom line by earning $2.57 versus $2.26 in the prior year. This year, the market expects an improvement in earnings ($2.80 versus $2.57).
- The net income growth from the same quarter one year ago has significantly exceeded that of the S&P 500 and the Tobacco industry. The net income increased by 153.3% when compared to the same quarter one year prior, rising from $488.00 million to $1,236.00 million.
- The company's current return on equity greatly increased when compared to its ROE from the same quarter one year prior. This is a signal of significant strength within the corporation. Compared to other companies in the Tobacco industry and the overall market, ALTRIA GROUP INC's return on equity significantly exceeds that of both the industry average and the S&P 500.
- You can view the full Altria Group Ratings Report.
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