Trade-Ideas: VF (VFC) 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 VF as such a stock due to the following factors:
- VFC has more that 20x the normal benchmarked social activity for this time of the day compared to its average of 10.52 mentions/day.
- VFC has an average dollar-volume (as measured by average daily share volume multiplied by share price) of $178.4 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 VFC:
V.F. Corporation designs, manufactures, or sources from independent contractors various apparel and footwear products primarily in the United States and Europe. The stock currently has a dividend yield of 1.7%. VFC has a PE ratio of 32.5. Currently there are 15 analysts that rate VF a buy, no analysts rate it a sell, and 5 rate it a hold.
The average volume for VF has been 2.5 million shares per day over the past 30 days. VF has a market cap of $33.4 billion and is part of the consumer goods sector and consumer non-durables industry. The stock has a beta of 1.00 and a short float of 1.1% with 2.03 days to cover. Shares are up 2.4% year-to-date as of the close of trading on Tuesday.
Analysis:
rates VF as a
. The company's strengths can be seen in multiple areas, such as its revenue growth, largely solid financial position with reasonable debt levels by most measures, solid stock price performance, good cash flow from operations and expanding profit margins. We feel these strengths outweigh the fact that the company has had sub par growth in net income.
Highlights from the ratings report include:
- Despite its growing revenue, the company underperformed as compared with the industry average of 17.4%. Since the same quarter one year prior, revenues slightly increased by 8.8%. 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.
- VFC's debt-to-equity ratio is very low at 0.26 and is currently below that of the industry average, implying that there has been very successful management of debt levels. Along with the favorable debt-to-equity ratio, the company maintains an adequate quick ratio of 1.39, which illustrates the ability to avoid short-term cash problems.
- Compared to its closing price of one year ago, VFC's share price has jumped by 28.49%, exceeding the performance of the broader market during that same time frame. Looking ahead, the stock's sharp rise over the last year has already helped drive it to a level which is relatively expensive compared to the rest of its industry. We feel, however, that other strengths this company displays justify these higher price levels.
- Net operating cash flow has increased to $1,330.78 million or 22.31% when compared to the same quarter last year. Despite an increase in cash flow, VF CORP's cash flow growth rate is still lower than the industry average growth rate of 45.60%.
- 49.04% is the gross profit margin for VF CORP which we consider to be strong. Regardless of VFC's high profit margin, it has managed to decrease from the same period last year. Despite the mixed results of the gross profit margin, the net profit margin of 3.41% trails the industry average.
- You can view the full VF Ratings Report.
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