AutoZone (AZO) 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 AutoZone as such a stock due to the following factors:
- AZO has more that 20x the normal benchmarked social activity for this time of the day compared to its average of 29.00 mentions/day.
- AZO has an average dollar-volume (as measured by average daily share volume multiplied by share price) of $184.4 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 AZO:
AutoZone, Inc. retails and distributes automotive replacement parts and accessories in the United States. AZO has a PE ratio of 19.9. Currently there are 3 analysts that rate AutoZone a buy, 1 analyst rates it a sell, and 14 rate it a hold.
The average volume for AutoZone has been 274,500 shares per day over the past 30 days. AutoZone has a market cap of $20.7 billion and is part of the services sector and retail industry. The stock has a beta of 0.73 and a short float of 8% with 7.88 days to cover. Shares are up 5.3% year-to-date as of the close of trading on Tuesday.
Analysis:
rates AutoZone as a
. The company's strengths can be seen in multiple areas, such as its solid stock price performance, growth in earnings per share, revenue growth, expanding profit margins and good cash flow from operations. Although no company is perfect, currently we do not see any significant weaknesses which are likely to detract from the generally positive outlook.
Highlights from the ratings report include:
- The stock has not only risen over the past year, it has done so at a faster pace than the S&P 500, reflecting the earnings growth and other positive factors similar to those we have cited here. Turning our attention to the future direction of the stock, it goes without saying that even the best stocks can fall in an overall down market. However, in any other environment, this stock still has good upside potential despite the fact that it has already risen in the past year.
- AUTOZONE INC has improved earnings per share by 15.6% 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, AUTOZONE INC increased its bottom line by earning $31.66 versus $27.88 in the prior year. This year, the market expects an improvement in earnings ($35.80 versus $31.66).
- Despite its growing revenue, the company underperformed as compared with the industry average of 13.5%. Since the same quarter one year prior, revenues slightly increased by 8.0%. Growth in the company's revenue appears to have helped boost the earnings per share.
- The gross profit margin for AUTOZONE INC is rather high; currently it is at 54.76%. It has increased from the same quarter the previous year. Along with this, the net profit margin of 10.54% is above that of the industry average.
- Net operating cash flow has slightly increased to $375.23 million or 5.00% when compared to the same quarter last year. Despite an increase in cash flow, AUTOZONE INC's average is still marginally south of the industry average growth rate of 13.79%.
- You can view the full AutoZone Ratings Report.
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