I have 9 stocks from the earning list reporting ;last week, and I graphed the 5 most of interest. In the top panel the red line is quarterly EPS growth rate, the black line is quarterly revenue growth rate. In the middle, the red line is quarterly EPS, the black line is price, the ggreen line is quarterly revenue, and the blue line is price relative to SPX. All of these reported the end of a fiscal year, so the large red bars are annual EPS. At the bottom the black bars are volume.
AFSI reported accelerating growth, although that was coming off a negative quarter. Quarterly EPS doesn't look that impressive, but annual EPS does, and quarterly revenue is growing at a very consistent pace. Price seems to be reponding more to revenue than to EPS. If this gets some volume it could become a leading stock.
I included CPLA, which reported negative growth and is not likely to make the next cut, because it illustrates nicely how the market "knew" something was wrong here before it became common knowledge. Price peaked well before earnings did, and collapsed ahead of the earnings collapse. I like to chide the market for being dumb, but it isn't. When it speaks, you better listen, and if you think you are smarter than the market, you will have your head handed to you.
DDIC also reported accelerating growth coming off a negative quarter. To say earnings here are inconsistent is an understatement. However, it does have some potential for high growth. The market seems to agree.
KS is another with inconsistent earnings growth but consistent revenue growth, and another where price seems to be paying closer attention to revenue growth. It just broke out of what looks like a second stage base, so it still has a high potential move up to go.
SCL is also a potential leading stock that has slow but consistent annual EPS growth. Ingore the revenue line prior to January 2010, as I have incomplete data on this (those are annual revenue figures, the ones after that are quarterly. I am trying to find a way to incorporate annual revenue into the graph without making it unreadable). The market cap on this is almost $1 B, which is larger than what I am looking for on this list, but it has a very small number of shares in the float (7m), which makes the supply/demand dynamic here very attractive: large volume=large moves.
