Tag: EPS

Featured stock of the month: #Verizon $VZ

Verizon (ticker: $VZ ) has been a great investment for me so far, I have owned it for about 2 years now. It is one of the value stocks which offers both a solid dividend (>4%) and capital appreciation.

It is considered a 5G play and its deal with $DIS related to Disney+ has helped it soar.

Verizon is a mega cap, with a market value of 240B $. It currently trades at 58.13$ and it was trading at about 48$ when I bought it. This means a 20+% capital appreciation which outperformed the SP500 by 15 percentage points over the same period. And then you have to add the dividend, which was about 5% at the start of my investment and is now 4.28%. American stocks typically pay dividends out on a quarterly basis which gives you the option of re-investing more frequently than, say, most European stocks which pay a dividend on a yearly basis.

In terms of valuation, the stock is actually quite pricey at the moment and the projected total return over the next 5 years, including dividend, is of 41%. There are plenty of better valued stocks out there which offer a greater growth potential (even >100%), like $AMZN and $TSLA, but you probably want to combine more aggressive plays with other less volatile investments in order to stabilise your portfolio. In 2008, when the market was down 38.5%, Verizon was “only” down 21%. So far in 2020 Verizon is down 7% compared to a 15% fall of the SP500.

The stock has had a steep recover from the late March lows and is now trading above the 5 and the 50 moving average, with the 200 moving average within grasp.

VZ TA

It reports earnings for Q1 of 2020 on Friday the 24th of April. Consensus estimates are EPS of $1.22 and revenue of $32.37B.

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Featured stock of the week: #Accenture $ACN

Accenture ($ACN) provides management consulting, technology, and outsourcing services and is normally among the first companies reporting earnings at the beginning of each quarter: I find their earnings more interesting than those of Alcoa which have traditionally been considered as the start of the earnings period.

The company reported an earnings beat for Q3 on June 28th for both EPS and revenue. Guidance was reported as being in-line with expectations. Earnings misses are rare for $ACN and the company forecasts more top- and bottom-line growth in the quarters ahead.

The company is now up 8% YTD and has beaten the market over the years doubling its value over the last 5 years and tripling its value over the last 10 years. Despite these capital appreciation figures, it also yields a 1.6% dividend to its investors.

Here is a snapshot of their operations as of the first half of 2018:

Accenture is a global leader in the digital transformation and is also seen by some as a #blockchain play.