Trade-Ideas: Cigna (CI) Is Today's New Lifetime High 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.
Trade-Ideas LLC identified
(
) as a new lifetime high candidate. In addition to specific proprietary factors, Trade-Ideas identified Cigna as such a stock due to the following factors:
- CI has an average dollar-volume (as measured by average daily share volume multiplied by share price) of $215.0 million.
- CI has traded 28,858 shares today.
- CI is trading at a new lifetime high.
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More details on CI:
Cigna Corporation, a health services organization, provides insurance and related products and services in the United States and internationally. The stock currently has a dividend yield of 0%. CI has a PE ratio of 15.4. Currently there are 9 analysts that rate Cigna a buy, no analysts rate it a sell, and 6 rate it a hold.
The average volume for Cigna has been 1.4 million shares per day over the past 30 days. Cigna has a market cap of $31.1 billion and is part of the health care sector and health services industry. The stock has a beta of 0.82 and a short float of 0.9% with 1.44 days to cover. Shares are up 19.3% year-to-date as of the close of trading on Thursday.
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Analysis:
rates Cigna as a
. The company's strengths can be seen in multiple areas, such as its solid stock price performance, impressive record of earnings per share growth, revenue growth, largely solid financial position with reasonable debt levels by most measures and notable return on equity. We feel these strengths outweigh the fact that the company shows weak operating cash flow.
Highlights from the ratings report include:
- Despite its growing revenue, the company underperformed as compared with the industry average of 18.5%. Since the same quarter one year prior, revenues slightly increased by 9.5%. Growth in the company's revenue appears to have helped boost the earnings per share.
- The current debt-to-equity ratio, 0.48, is low and is below the industry average, implying that there has been successful management of debt levels.
- Current return on equity exceeded its ROE from the same quarter one year prior. This is a clear sign of strength within the company. Compared to other companies in the Health Care Providers & Services industry and the overall market, CIGNA CORP's return on equity exceeds that of both the industry average and the S&P 500.
- Powered by its strong earnings growth of 37.20% and other important driving factors, this stock has surged by 54.79% over the past year, outperforming the rise in the S&P 500 Index during the same period. Regarding the stock's future course, although almost any stock can fall in a broad market decline, CI should continue to move higher despite the fact that it has already enjoyed a very nice gain in the past year.
- CIGNA CORP has improved earnings per share by 37.2% 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, CIGNA CORP increased its bottom line by earning $7.82 versus $5.20 in the prior year. This year, the market expects an improvement in earnings ($8.45 versus $7.82).
- You can view the full Cigna Ratings Report.
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