U.S. Bancorp (USB): Stock With Unusual Social Activity
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 U.S. Bancorp as such a stock due to the following factors:
- USB has more that 20x the normal benchmarked social activity for this time of the day compared to its average of 11.32 mentions/day.
- USB has an average dollar-volume (as measured by average daily share volume multiplied by share price) of $212.3 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 USB:
U.S. Bancorp, a financial services holding company, provides a range of financial services in the United States. The stock currently has a dividend yield of 2.2%. USB has a PE ratio of 14.6. Currently there are 5 analysts that rate U.S. Bancorp a buy, 2 analysts rate it a sell, and 14 rate it a hold.
The average volume for U.S. Bancorp has been 7.0 million shares per day over the past 30 days. U.S has a market cap of $79.9 billion and is part of the financial sector and banking industry. The stock has a beta of 0.82 and a short float of 1.1% with 4.26 days to cover. Shares are down 0.4% year-to-date as of the close of trading on Tuesday.
Analysis:
rates U.S. Bancorp as a
. The company's strengths can be seen in multiple areas, such as its revenue growth, expanding profit margins, increase in stock price during the past year, growth in earnings per share and increase in net income. We feel these strengths outweigh the fact that the company has had somewhat disappointing return on equity.
Highlights from the ratings report include:
- USB's revenue growth has slightly outpaced the industry average of 4.6%. Since the same quarter one year prior, revenues slightly increased by 4.7%. This growth in revenue appears to have trickled down to the company's bottom line, improving the earnings per share.
- The stock has risen over the past year as investors have generally rewarded the company for its earnings growth and other positive factors like the ones we have cited in this report. 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.
- The gross profit margin for U S BANCORP is currently very high, coming in at 88.19%. It has increased from the same quarter the previous year. Along with this, the net profit margin of 27.19% significantly outperformed against the industry average.
- U S BANCORP's earnings per share improvement from the most recent quarter was slightly positive. 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, U S BANCORP increased its bottom line by earning $3.08 versus $3.01 in the prior year. This year, the market expects an improvement in earnings ($3.27 versus $3.08).
- The net income growth from the same quarter one year ago has exceeded that of the Commercial Banks industry average, but is less than that of the S&P 500. The net income increased by 2.2% when compared to the same quarter one year prior, going from $1,456.00 million to $1,488.00 million.
- You can view the full U.S. Bancorp Ratings Report.
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