Mmm Mmm, good earnings! Campbell Soup is outperforming the market and its stock just got a key rating upgrade. The Campbell stock Relative Strength (RS) Rating rose from 80 to 83 Wednesday, putting it in a group of top-performing stocks.
Campbell Stock Rises Into Elite Group
The upgraded 83 Relative Strength Rating shows that Campbell stock has outperformed 83% of all stocks in terms of price performance over the past 12 months. Market history shows that the stocks that go on to make the biggest gains tend to have an RS Rating over 80 as they launch their biggest runs.
Campbell's sales and profit gains haven't been spectacular, but they're pretty good for a company with a $10 billion run rate. Its fiscal second quarter earnings rose 15%, to 80 cents per share. In the prior three quarters the diversified food company known for its soups reported 40% growth, then 8% and 16%. Revenue grew 12% to $2.49 billion last quarter vs. the same quarter a year earlier.
"The momentum of our business continued as we delivered double-digit sales and earnings per share growth for a second consecutive quarter," Campbell's President and CEO Mark Clouse said in the Q2 earnings release. "While the top line benefited from favorable net price realization, we also continued to see strong brand health."
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Working On Cup With Handle
Campbell stock is working on a cup with handle pattern with a 56.14 buy point. See if it can break out in heavy volume. On Wednesday, Campbell Soup edged down fractionally to above 54. The iconic soup-maker's stock has climbed 30% in a little over a year.
Campbell stock earns the No. 8 rank among its peers in the Food-Packaged industry group. Potato and other vegetables food vendor Lamb Weston is among the group's top-rated stocks. So is soup, infant feeding and various beverages maker TreeHouse Foods.
When looking for the best stocks to buy and watch, one factor to watch closely is relative price strength.
IBD's proprietary Relative Strength Rating measures market leadership by using a 1 (worst) to 99 (best) score that indicates how a stock's price action over the trailing 52 weeks matches up against that of all other stocks.
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