I find I am up 30% in this holding so thank you to Saul and others who commented and drew my attention to it on this board. ABMD had not come through my screens because of a short history (and a screening anomaly concerned with an absent figure).
I find ABMD very difficult to value in terms of growth prospects, especially considering a St. Jude product anticipated, I think, in December. Whether it has become a momentum stock, or others with more medical science knowledge than I have appraised it favourably, I do not know.
Comments welcome!
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I find ABMD very difficult to value
I agree.
Like most on this board (including Saul) I mostly look at non-GAAP P/E, but I always at least consider that perhaps GAAP numbers (more visible since GAAP P/E is what you see on most websites and screeners) influences a lot of people’s buys and sells, though obviously most everyone makes their own adjustments. Without even knowing what exactly happened tax-wise (or whatever) in the March quarter of 2015, I can see that it’s hugely affected GAAP P/E. It’s at 33 (still high, but maybe not unexpectedly so for a growth company like this), the real (non-GAAP) P/E sits somewhere between 100 and 150! (I estimated)
It also just strikes me that a $4B market cap is huge for a company that has never had more than a few hundred million per year in sales.
I know I have taken broad strokes here, and I’m probably already pretty obviously the guy who doesn’t like momentum stocks, which I would call this, and pretty much anything with a P/E so high I can’t understand it. But if you assign it a reasonable P/E like 15 or even 20, how many years of growth before it grows into its valuation? Wouldn’t your money be better off in something else?
Here’s the real question I’d love you to answer: what is the fundamental thing that’s keeping the stock price up? It’s not a reasonable earnings multiple. Is it simply the expectation of future growth? I don’t think so…not sure it’s expected to grow much faster than LGIH which has a PE around 10. You already said it might be a momentum stock – does that mean it’s propped up mostly by market sentiment? To me, that’s a scary thing.
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ABMD had not come through my screens because of a short history (and a screening anomaly concerned with an absent figure).
ABMD has almost 30 years of price history
http://invest.kleinnet.com/bmw1/stats25/ABMD.html
I find ABMD very difficult to value in terms of growth prospects,
According to the chart, the stock has an average growth rate of around 8% but it is extremely volatile and possibly overvalued at this time. I don’t follow this stock so I’m just reading the chart.
Denny Schlesinger
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It’s not quite as simple as that. This is something more than a momentum stock, take a look at the OM, ROIC, FCF ratios and growth. Some erratic figures make it difficult to value however, as well as the nature of the product vs. the competition (STJ). Hmm.