Thanks for stopping by. Taking a look first at the NYSE biggest advancers we find Home Depot near the top. We find HD trading currently at $31.10, up $3.03 or 10.79%. I have to confess to some bias in reviewing these charts and let me explain. I have found that the larger cap issues overall tend to perform better with this technique and also stocks over $10. If I can find issues on the NYSE, stocks even like Dell or Krispy Kreme, then I will go with them....many of the smaller issues I have been "shaken out" as they say in the business because a company trading at $4.00 a share, needs to go down only $.32 to reach the 8% stop.
Back to Home Depot. This is a long time growth stock favorite. Recently, it has sold off with relatively slower growth, presumably due to stiff competition with Lowes among other retail outfits.
Last quarter, just reported today (!), sales increased to $15.1 billion from 14.2 billion. However same store sales dropped 1.6% (a negative) although EXPECTATIONS were for a 2-4% drop in same store sales. what is important here is what the 'street' was expecting and HD outperformed.
Looking at Morningstar we find that sales have grown from $24.2 billion in 1998 to $30.2 billion in 1999, $38.4 billion in 2000, $45.7 billion in 2001, and $53.6 billion in 2002. Extrapolating out the first quarter...which is probably unreasonable due to somewhat seasonality of retail business, we can see a near $60 billion rate for the year 2003.
The cash flow of this company has really turned around as well from a -762 million in 2001 to a positive 2.57 billion in 2002 and the TTM as Morningstar says...is $3.6 billion in positive cash flow (TTM is 'trailing twelve months').
Anyhow, the issue is not perfect....but at a p/e of 17.9, this issue is ripe for the picking. Good luck and remember to hold to the 8% stop loss. I do own some shares of this stock among my different accounts...as do members of my family. Bob