Today's Unusual Social Activity Stock: Lincoln National (LNC)
Trade-Ideas LLC identified
(
) as an unusual social activity candidate. In addition to specific proprietary factors, Trade-Ideas identified Lincoln National as such a stock due to the following factors:
- LNC has more that 20x the normal benchmarked social activity for this time of the day compared to its average of 1.48 mentions/day.
- LNC has an average dollar-volume (as measured by average daily share volume multiplied by share price) of $150.6 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 LNC:
Lincoln National Corporation, through its subsidiaries, engages in multiple insurance and retirement businesses in the United States. It operates through four segments: Annuities, Retirement Plan Services, Life Insurance, and Group Protection. The stock currently has a dividend yield of 2.4%. LNC has a PE ratio of 1. Currently there are 4 analysts that rate Lincoln National a buy, no analysts rate it a sell, and 6 rate it a hold.
The average volume for Lincoln National has been 2.6 million shares per day over the past 30 days. Lincoln has a market cap of $9.8 billion and is part of the financial sector and insurance industry. The stock has a beta of 1.88 and a short float of 2.6% with 1.11 days to cover. Shares are down 14.7% year-to-date as of the close of trading on Thursday.
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Analysis:
rates Lincoln National as a
. The company's strengths can be seen in multiple areas, such as its attractive valuation levels and largely solid financial position with reasonable debt levels by most measures. We feel its strengths outweigh the fact that the company has had somewhat disappointing return on equity.
Highlights from the ratings report include:
- Despite the weak revenue results, LNC has outperformed against the industry average of 13.1%. Since the same quarter one year prior, revenues slightly dropped by 1.8%. Weakness in the company's revenue seems to have hurt the bottom line, decreasing earnings per share.
- Despite currently having a low debt-to-equity ratio of 0.39, it is higher than that of the industry average, inferring that management of debt levels may need to be evaluated further.
- LINCOLN NATIONAL CORP's earnings per share declined by 28.7% in the most recent quarter compared to the same quarter a year ago. The company has suffered a declining pattern of earnings per share over the past two years. However, we anticipate this trend to reverse over the coming year. During the past fiscal year, LINCOLN NATIONAL CORP reported lower earnings of $4.51 versus $5.66 in the prior year. This year, the market expects an improvement in earnings ($6.15 versus $4.51).
- The change in net income from the same quarter one year ago has exceeded that of the Insurance industry average, but is less than that of the S&P 500. The net income has significantly decreased by 30.7% when compared to the same quarter one year ago, falling from $300.00 million to $208.00 million.
- You can view the full Lincoln National Ratings Report.
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