Whole Foods Market (WFM) Is Today's Unusual Social Activity Stock

Trade-Ideas LLC identified Whole Foods Market (WFM) as an unusual social activity candidate
By TheStreet Wire ,

Trade-Ideas LLC identified

Whole Foods Market

(

WFM

) as an unusual social activity candidate. In addition to specific proprietary factors, Trade-Ideas identified Whole Foods Market as such a stock due to the following factors:

  • WFM has 12x the normal benchmarked social activity for this time of the day compared to its average of 25.13 mentions/day.
  • WFM has an average dollar-volume (as measured by average daily share volume multiplied by share price) of $222.4 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 WFM:

Whole Foods Market, Inc. operates as a retailer of natural and organic foods. The stock currently has a dividend yield of 1.7%. WFM has a PE ratio of 19. Currently there are 5 analysts that rate Whole Foods Market a buy, no analysts rate it a sell, and 17 rate it a hold.

The average volume for Whole Foods Market has been 5.4 million shares per day over the past 30 days. Whole Foods Market has a market cap of $11.2 billion and is part of the services sector and retail industry. The stock has a beta of 0.99 and a short float of 8.2% with 3.80 days to cover. Shares are down 39% year-to-date as of the close of trading on Wednesday.

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TheStreetRatings.com

Analysis:

TheStreet Quant Ratings

rates Whole Foods Market as a

hold

. The company's strengths can be seen in multiple areas, such as its revenue growth, increase in net income and good cash flow from operations. However, as a counter to these strengths, we also find weaknesses including a generally disappointing performance in the stock itself and disappointing return on equity.

Highlights from the ratings report include:

  • The revenue growth came in higher than the industry average of 5.2%. Since the same quarter one year prior, revenues slightly increased by 7.5%. This growth in revenue appears to have trickled down to the company's bottom line, improving the earnings per share.
  • The net income growth from the same quarter one year ago has exceeded that of the S&P 500 and the Food & Staples Retailing industry average. The net income increased by 1.3% when compared to the same quarter one year prior, going from $151.00 million to $153.00 million.
  • WFM's debt-to-equity ratio is very low at 0.02 and is currently below that of the industry average, implying that there has been very successful management of debt levels. Although the company had a strong debt-to-equity ratio, its quick ratio of 0.82 is somewhat weak and could be cause for future problems.
  • The company's current return on equity has slightly decreased from the same quarter one year prior. This implies a minor weakness in the organization. Compared to other companies in the Food & Staples Retailing industry and the overall market on the basis of return on equity, WHOLE FOODS MARKET INC has underperformed in comparison with the industry average, but has exceeded that of the S&P 500.
  • WFM has underperformed the S&P 500 Index, declining 21.90% from its price level of one year ago. Looking ahead, we do not see anything in this company's numbers that would change the one-year trend. It was down over the last twelve months; and it could be down again in the next twelve. Naturally, a bull or bear market could sway the movement of this stock.

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