I’m a newbie here and posting about a “new” stock with some trepidation. Hoping for some thoughtful response, though I confess upfront I myself don’t (yet?) have the time or patience for the type of rigorous analysis that characterizes many of the posts on this board.
What got my attention about Vivint was that following very well-received earnings and a big run-up in the stock, the CEO has been buying shares very aggressively. He bought nearly 21,000 shares at $17.64 on 8/12. And the following day (yesterday) he bought another 32,000 shares at an average price of $19.36.
I love that he sold pest control services door-to-door and I love that he was on undercover boss. A JPM analyst was also raving about the stock yesterday.
Revenues and subscribers both increased y/y in the last quarter in a very difficult period. And it trades at around 3x sales.
Are “smart homes” a real trend with a massive future? It seems certain. Is Vivint best-positioned amid what I’m sure is an immensely competitive field? I have no idea. But at this price, I’m willing to take a small position as I do more research. I welcome your critiques, addenda.
I’ll take a stab at it. This company is too young to have any history to measure against Saul’s criteria. What info is available in the one and only earnings report claims an 8% growth in revenue. That’s not a hypergrowth stock and further analysis is not likely needed. Maybe it can grow into something but it is OT for this board.
It probably wouldn’t hurt to have a standardized template to fill out for reporting new ideas.
At the very least you should include a symbol and introduction to what the company does! One shortcut: If you go to Yahoo finance you can copy and paste the description.
I tried a search and came up with a solar company and a smart home company, both named Vivint.
Before recommending a company here (because you don’t want to waste your own time), you really should check the revenue year-over-year growth rate for recent quarters. It should only take a couple of minutes. Then, if that looks decent, gross margin, debt, etc. Again this shouldn’t take more than a few minutes.
You could probably do all of the above in the time it took me to read this thread and make this reply. I hope this doesn’t sound too harsh. I’m taking the time to reply here to help of course. The stuff above can really help you cut down on new ideas and find a gem that we can all really sink our teeth into!
The universal recommendation is to get all such information from the investor pages of the company web site. All other sources are incomplete and subject to errors.
Appreciate these points. Are there some stock screeners you (or others) would recommend? I cannot find gross margin, for example.
Stock screeners of a single metric (or several metrics) like that are not what this board is about. If that is what interests you there are many other boards that would welcome you, but not this board. This board is set up for the discussion of individual high growth stocks.
Saul
Right. This is something I started doing only recently, so not everyone knows this stuff.
Every company has an investor relations site. You can see all the reports right there. You can sign up for events (such as earnings announcements) and press releases to be emailed right to you. It is really nice! Here is the one you want I think: http://investors.vivint.com/financial-information/quarterly-…
Gross margins are reported directly, as is revenue/sales. You can make a little spread sheet of all the numbers and create growth numbers by comparing each quarter with the same one a year earlier (quarterly YoY).
I have found this site, rocketfinancial.com, to be incredible. You have to make a login but I haven’t had any spam or issues that I can notice. They even responded promptly to email asking questions about their work. The data gives revenue growth rates at a glance right along side the financial data taken from the reports and even offers links directly to the filings themselves. They even include pre-IPO filings if possible! I have found the share counts and other data to be spot on so far. Please do verify yourself though! Just click “Financials” then “Quarterly” to see the numbers.
…HOWEVER, I copy and pasted the ticker symbol right from the investor relations website in to Rocket and a different company shows up, Mosaic Acquisitions (http://www.rocketfinancial.com/Overview.aspx?fID=344860&…) I don’t know why.
I think we should kill this thread at this point unless a detailed pitch comes in to it.