Zacks Bull and Bear of the Day Highlights: Hibbett Sporting Goods, Ingram Micro, CME Group, Goldman Sachs and UBS AG
For Immediate Release
Chicago, IL – November 29, 2011 – Zacks Equity Research highlights Hibbett Sporting Goods (NasdaqGS:HIBB - News) as the Bull of the Day and Ingram Micro (NYSE:IM - News) as the Bear of the Day. In addition, Zacks Equity Research provides analysis on CME Group (NasdaqGS:CME - News), Goldman Sachs (NYSE:GS - News) and UBS AG (NYSE:UBS - News).
Full analysis of all these stocks is available at http://at.zacks.com/?id=2678.
Here is a synopsis of all five stocks:
Bull of the Day:
Hibbett Sporting Goods' (NasdaqGS:HIBB - News) earnings of $0.59 per share for the third quarter ended October 2011 beat the Zacks Consensus Estimate of $0.51 and surged 34% from the prior-year quarter on the heels of robust performance of footwear and apparel sales along with operational efficiencies. Management has raised its earnings guidance for the current fiscal year to a range of $2.05 to $2.11 a share.
Management also remains committed to expanding the store network. Moreover, Hibbett's sharp focus on mid-sized and smaller markets and strategic mix of branded as well as localized merchandise provide an edge over its rivals. Also, the company has a healthy balance sheet with no bank debt.
Our long-term Outperform recommendation on the stock indicates that it would perform well above the market. Our target price of $47.00, 22.2x 2011 EPS, reflects this view.
Bear of the Day:
Ingram Micro (NYSE:IM - News) is one of the world's largest distributors of IT products. The company failed to impress with its third quarter 2011 results. Moreover, the soft retail sector in Europe and the Asia-Pacific, as well as the ERP transition issue in Australia resulted in an unexciting 2011 guidance.
Though management appears confident about most of the near-term issues and the regaining of market share in Australia, we remain cautious. Also, while the company's strategic partnerships with IT giants are encouraging, its significant European exposure, high dependence on IT spending and debt-laden balance sheet are causes for concern.
Hence, we have downgraded the stock to Underperform from Neutral. Our target price of $16.00 reflects a P/E multiple of 9.9x our 2011 EPS estimate, which is at a slight premium to the industry average.
Latest Posts on the Zacks Analyst Blog:
Jon Corzine: Turkey of the Year
The collapse of MF Global will have many fascinating story lines to uncover over the next several months. Here are at least four...
1) How did regulators like FINRA, which noticed leverage problems with the firm's $6.3 billion bet on European debt over the summer, not act sooner and more decisively to prevent the questionable speculation with other people's money from ending very badly?
2) Between $600 million and $1.2 billion in funds are missing. What's more interesting to me than where the money is found, is how it got illegally moved from customer segregated accounts in the first place.
Did Jon Corzine call the shots? We may never know if he pleads the fifth next month and no one else tells the truth.
3) What does this mean for futures exchanges like CME Group (NasdaqGS:CME - News) who up till now have maintained a spotless record of protecting customer funds involved in trading positions through a rigorous risk control system using mark-to-market against exchange-monitored collateral?
It's one thing for an exchange to be vigorous with the trading risk and collateral it watches every second of the day, and another to be responsible for constantly auditing the cash balances of tens of thousands of customer trading accounts not directly under its control and spread around the world.
4) If we do get more facts on how the former Goldman Sachs (NYSE:GS - News) chief may have gambled away the money and livelihoods of thousands of people, what will we learn about the decision-making processes of an apparently upstanding citizen who served New Jersey for nearly a decade as both a US Senator and its Governor?
I can take a shot at giving you a preview of the answer to number four because I predicted something like this would happen (again) in a July 2008 article I wrote for SFO Magazine, "The Mental Models of Financial Sabotage."
So even before we learned of Bernie Madoff's enormous ponzi scheme in December 2008, Raj Rajaratnam's insider-trading club in October 2009, and the hidden $2 billion shank by a UBS AG (NYSE:UBS - News) trader recently, I made a list of the biggest rogue traders and hedge fund blow-ups and proposed that they would keep on happening.
Get the full analysis of all these stocks by going to http://at.zacks.com/?id=2649.
About the Bull and Bear of the Day
Every day, the analysts at Zacks Equity Research select two stocks that are likely to outperform (Bull) or underperform (Bear) the markets over the next 3-6 months.
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