For any of you waking up this morning and noticing disturbingly low trading volume on your favorite stocks, that’s because it’s Good Friday and the markets are closed. I’m guessing that you, like I, are not Catholic and therefore always get caught by surprise when Easter rolls around every year.
However, as long as you’re here, perhaps it’s time for some Easter-themed stock analysis. Easter, of course, is meant to commemorate the death of Jesus Christ on the cross and his resurrection after laying in his tomb for three days. In that spirit, I thought we would look at some stocks currently in the midst of coming back from the dead. Each of these four companies has experienced a serious decline in recent years only to hit bottom and bounce back.
All six of these companies have gained 30% or more over the last month and are currently trading hands at prices that are at least double their 52-week low. In many cases, they’re still trading at well below previous highs of the last few years, but there’s still time for them to get there if any of these rallies hold.
GW Pharmaceuticals (GWPH)
Market Cap: $1.72 billion
Performance Last Month: 87.01%
Gain Over 52-Week Low: 127.83%
GW Pharmaceuticals is a company we’re familiar with here at Equities.com, having followed it closely during our special feature series The Future of Cannabis. GW Pharmaceuticals is developing medicines using cannabis, focusing particularly on the treatment of seizures using the cannabinoid CBD. The company received orphan drug status for Epidiolex, its CBD-based treatment for Dravet Syndrome.
GW’s stock has been in freefall since July of last year, perhaps experiencing a pullback form the high of $134 a share it hit during a period of considerable enthusiasm and hitting a low of $35.83, nearly $100 below its 52-week high. However, things changed for GW just last Monday when a clinical trial showed that Epidiolex created a significant reduction in median convulsive seizures 39% of the time as compared to 13% for the placebo. That spiked the stock about 130% to nearly $85 a share in a single day of trading.
SunCoke Energy (SXC)
Market Cap: $356.52 million
Performance Last Month: 47.1%
Gain Over 52-Week Low: 197.07%
SunCoke Energy has made a lot of money selling coke. No, not that coke, the coke that’s an essential material in the making of steel. SunCoke saw shares plunge nearly 90% in 2015, from a high just shy of $18 a share in late April to a low in January that was just over $2 a share. How? Well, coke makers operate in both the coal and steel industries, both of which were pretty lousy in 2015. Slowing growth in China and Brazil meant a drastic reduction in steel demand, and the coal industry has been hammered by low natural gas prices.
However, SunCoke managed to defy expectations this spring with its Q4 earnings report, when they swung from a loss in the same period in 2014 to a $19 million profit. That meant that earnings per share was at $0.30, $0.19 once you accounted for extinguishing debt. That was still well above the $0.05 a share Zacks was anticipating and has meant that the stock nearly tripled in just a couple of months.
Investing in coke production is hardly a long-term growth play, but an undervalued company is an undervalued company and SunCoke’s P/S ratio is currently at 0.29 with a P/FCF of 10.45. This may be a dead cat bounce, but there’s also reason to think it might be more.
Platinum Group Metals (PLG)
Market Cap: $278.79 million
Performance Last Month: 79.21%
Gain Over 52-Week Low: 262.00%
Platinum Group Metals is a platinum exploration and development company. Platinum is actually rarer than gold, but unlike gold, it tends to trade as an industrial metal rather than as a speculative investment vehicle. The company’s decline and recovery appear to largely match the changes to the price of platinum, which took it from over $1,100 an ounce in March of 2015 to just over $800 an ounce in January. Since then, though, it has bounced back to just under $1,000 an ounce.
That was likely well-timed, as the company also performed a 1:10 stock consolidation in late January that helped push prices back over $1 a share and appears to have bolstered the company once again. Either way, the stock has more than tripled since the start of the year.
New York & Company (NWY)
Market Cap: $249.81 million
Performance Last Month: 74.18%
Gain Over 52-Week Low: 103.85%
New York & Company is in the fickle industry of fashion, which might explain the precipitous decline it experienced from a level over $6.50 a share in July of 2013 to a low under $2 a share in February of this year. The company experienced revenue declines in 2013 and 2014 and swung to a loss for FY 2015.
However, so far in 2016, things are bouncing back. The company’s Q4 2015 earnings report revealed that they had boosted revenue from $923.33 million in 2014 to $950.11 million in 2015 and cut their losses from $16.89 million to $10.07 million over that same period. This was more than enough to have investors show some excitement again, popping the stock to a new 52-week high of $3.75 a share during trading on Thursday, more than double the 52-week low of $1.82 a share it hit just over a month earlier.
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