Trade-Ideas: American Express (AXP) Is Today's Post-Market Leader Stock

Trade-Ideas LLC identified American Express (AXP) as a post-market leader candidate
By TheStreet Wire ,

Trade-Ideas LLC identified

American Express

(

AXP

) as a post-market leader candidate. In addition to specific proprietary factors, Trade-Ideas identified American Express as such a stock due to the following factors:

  • AXP has an average dollar-volume (as measured by average daily share volume multiplied by share price) of $286.3 million.
  • AXP is up 2.4% today from today's close.

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More details on AXP:

American Express Company, together with its subsidiaries, provides charge and credit payment card products and travel-related services to consumers and businesses worldwide. It operates through four segments: U.S. The stock currently has a dividend yield of 1.8%. AXP has a PE ratio of 13. Currently there are 4 analysts that rate American Express a buy, 6 analysts rate it a sell, and 13 rate it a hold.

The average volume for American Express has been 4.9 million shares per day over the past 30 days. American Express has a market cap of $60.9 billion and is part of the financial sector and financial services industry. The stock has a beta of 1.18 and a short float of 2.2% with 4.51 days to cover. Shares are down 7.8% year-to-date as of the close of trading on Tuesday.

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TheStreetRatings.com

Analysis:

TheStreet Quant Ratings

rates American Express as a

hold

. The company's strengths can be seen in multiple areas, such as its revenue growth, good cash flow from operations and notable return on equity. However, as a counter to these strengths, we also find weaknesses including generally higher debt management risk, poor profit margins and a generally disappointing performance in the stock itself.

Highlights from the ratings report include:

  • Despite its growing revenue, the company underperformed as compared with the industry average of 3.4%. Since the same quarter one year prior, revenues slightly increased by 1.8%. This growth in revenue does not appear to have trickled down to the company's bottom line, displayed by a decline in earnings per share.
  • Net operating cash flow has increased to $2,469.00 million or 16.13% when compared to the same quarter last year. Despite an increase in cash flow, AMERICAN EXPRESS CO's cash flow growth rate is still lower than the industry average growth rate of 42.99%.
  • AMERICAN EXPRESS CO' earnings per share from the most recent quarter came in slightly below the year earlier quarter. The company has reported a trend of declining earnings per share over the past year. However, the consensus estimate suggests that this trend should reverse in the coming year. During the past fiscal year, AMERICAN EXPRESS CO reported lower earnings of $5.03 versus $5.55 in the prior year. This year, the market expects an improvement in earnings ($5.52 versus $5.03).
  • The gross profit margin for AMERICAN EXPRESS CO is currently lower than what is desirable, coming in at 30.51%. It has decreased from the same quarter the previous year. Regardless of the weak results of the gross profit margin, the net profit margin of 16.75% is above that of the industry average.
  • The debt-to-equity ratio is very high at 2.41 and currently higher than the industry average, implying increased risk associated with the management of debt levels within the company.

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