I had two stocks on the earnings list reporting this week, both reporting quarters of negative growth. The graphs have been updated for the new year, and may still have a few bugs. The major change is that I eliminated 2006 data, so the charts start January 2007. In the top panel, the red line is quarterly EPS growth rate, black quarterly revenue growth. in the middle the red line is quarterly EPS, green quarterly revenue, black price, and blue price relative to SPX. If the stock is reporting the end of a fiscal year, the large red bars are annual EPS. At the bottom the black bars are volume.
First up is
CVGW, a stock which never reports when they are supposed to, so I usually don't know about it until after the fact. This has taken a big drop in EPS recently, but revenue is still in an up trend, and so is price, so it appears that the market is anticipating a resumption in EPS growth. You can't really see it on this chart, but this is currently forming a high handle and may be getting ready for another breakout. This averages about 50k shares a day, so don't expect it to move fast, but I am considering this for a small, long term position.
PSMT made a pretty dramatic move after breaking out in late 2010 (this is a linear chart, so the move is not as dramatic as it looks), putting it among the market leaders recently. It is coming off two consecutive quarters of negative growth, which stopped the up trend dead in it's tracks. There are two likely scenarios here: this is forming a base which it will break out of when the growth cycle restarts; or, the growth cycle is over and it wiull come down faster than it went up. At this point it is just about impossible to tell which one is most likely.
I will be working on getting the charts more readable this quarter. Grapher 8 is a pretty expensive program, but the manual for it is huge and I have read only the basic parts, but considering it's price, it really should be producing better charts. These charts are usable for my purposes, but are really not very good for publication.
