Sinking or Rising: Top 10 S&P Winners and Losers, Year-to-Date

Below (click to enlarge) is Value Expectations’ analysis of the companies in the S&P 500 with the 10 best and 10 worst returns for 2009 YTD (excluding financial companies). Comparing the sales growth expectations priced in (VE sales growth) to what the company has delivered in sales growth historically allows us to see which firms have the most reasonable sales growth expectations implied by their current trading prices and thus are more likely to outperform.

Will the companies with the best returns be able to maintain their momentum for the remainder of 2009? Will the companies with the worst returns be able to turn things around? We will track the S&P 500 winners and losers in the year ahead and provide you with regular updates.

10 Worst S&P 500 Companies 2009 YTD

10 Best S&P 500 Companies 2009 YTD

*data as of close Feb. 20, 2009

*AFG’s Value Expectation allows us to understand the imbedded Sales Growth, EBITDA Margins, and Asset Turnovers a company has to deliver in the future to justify its current trading price. In theory and in normal circumstances, if the imbedded future performance is very conservative relative to the company’s historical performance, the stock is regarded as undervalued. The table displays the implied future sales growth of companies assuming their EBITDA margins and Asset turnovers stay at the 5 year median levels.

Comments

[PeteK:]

This calls for "BUY AMERICAN."
For the sake of the USA.

Feb 26 12:12 PM

[BeachRider:]

I am always fascinated by the press that JAVA gets. Certainly, JAVA was beaten down badly in 2008. Java is a good buy IFF their next quarter shows that their operating model from the previous quarterly report is continuing. Too many long-term projections for JAVA performance have been made from the jumpy quarterly successes/failures.

The HP and IBM Solaris-on-Intel deals don't weigh in for much. It is more about their own software-sales and hardware-sales.

It seems likely that both will contract a bit for the next few quarters. The economic outlook for USA, Europe and Japan isn't rosy enough yet to predict better stuff.

Mar 03 01:03 PM