Stocks tend to be most volatile around earnings season, when a good or bad report can make or break it. However, a good or even great earnings report doesn't necessarily translate into a huge pop for a stock.
During earnings season, BullMarket.com publishes a comprehensive 20- to 30-page Earnings Preview report for the week ahead each Friday.
Over the past two years, BullMarket.com used the data it has collected to correctly predict investor reactions for nearly two-third of the stocks it's previewed.
In its latest earnings preview, BullMarket.com looks at several popular stocks still set to report earnings, including LinkedIn (LNKD - News), Whole Foods (WFM - News), Visa (V - News), Acme Packet (APKT - News), Skullcandy (SKUL - News), and Green Mountain (GMCR - News).
Here is just a tiny sample of what BullMarket.com wrote about Whole Foods:
Whole Foods Market is a natural and organic foods supermarket. It currently has more than 300 stores in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom. ...
Last quarter, The company reported a 33% increase in profit for the 16-week period ended January 15th, spurred by an 8.7% increase in sales on a same-store basis. The momentum carried on into the current quarter, the company said in early February, as it noted its same store sales were up 9.4%
through the first week of February.
Whole Foods said it earned $118.3 million, or 65 cents a share for its fiscal first quarter, up from $88.7 million, or 51 cents, in the comparable period a year earlier. Sales rose 13% to $3.39 billion.
"There are some positive things happening on the economic front which we are hopeful will continue," Chief Executive Walter Robb said on a conference call with analysts. "We have tremendous sales momentum as well as the capital and expense discipline in place to leverage that momentum to the bottom line."
The average weekly sales per store of $667,000 translated into near-record sales per square foot of $929. The company's operating margin was 5.6%, marking its 11th consecutive quarter of year-over-year operating margin improvement. Its EBITDA margin was 8.3%.
Management increased its full-year EPS guidance to a range of $2.28 to $2.32, up from its original view of $2.21 to $2.26. ...
Whole Foods has surpassed analyst EPS estimates each quarter over the past two years. During that span, the stock has risen the next session six of eight quarters. Seasonally, the stock has risen three of the past four years. . ...
Outside of earnings, Whole Foods is a very strong company that will continue to benefit from the public's embrace of natural and organic foods. Whole Foods already does very well with the Baby Boom generation because as its members age they have become more health conscious. It also does well with younger buyers who were raised eating natural foods and thus aren't converts. (News reports about so-called "pink slime" beef, even if inaccurate or misleading as the beef industry says they are, only serve to drive more consumers into the arms of purveyors like Whole Foods.)
The company has a long way to go to reach its 1,000-store target and we like its strategy of taking advantage of depressed real estate prices to broaden its footprint. Those new stores will only add to margins that are the envy of the grocery industry, especially since Whole Foods' more-affluent customer base willingly absorbs its higher price points. As we've also noted in prior reports, for all the talk of food cost inflation, Americans spend on average just 8% of their household income on food, compared with 15% in the 1970s and nearly 50% a century ago. ...
The full BullMarket.com earnings analysis includes a look at historical earnings data and EPS trends for the companies above and more; examines past investor reactions to earnings in various contexts; gives options activity analysis; reviews previous-quarter earnings; and gives an opinion on both what earnings will look like and how investors will react based on the aforementioned data points.
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