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Growth investors focus on stocks that are seeing above-average financial growth, as this feature helps these securities garner the market's attention and deliver solid returns. But finding a great growth stock is not easy at all.
By their very nature, these stocks carry above-average risk and volatility. Moreover, if a company's growth story is over or nearing its end, betting on it could lead to significant loss.
However, the Zacks Growth Style Score (part of the Zacks Style Scores system), which looks beyond the traditional growth attributes to analyze a company's real growth prospects, makes it pretty easy to find cutting-edge growth stocks.
Our proprietary system currently recommends CECO Environmental (CECO) as one such stock. This company not only has a favorable Growth Score, but also carries a top Zacks Rank.
Research shows that stocks carrying the best growth features consistently beat the market. And for stocks that have a combination of a Growth Score of A or B and a Zacks Rank #1 (Strong Buy) or 2 (Buy), returns are even better.
Here are three of the most important factors that make the stock of this maker of air pollution controls and industrial ventilation systems a great growth pick right now.
Earnings Growth
Earnings growth is arguably the most important factor, as stocks exhibiting exceptionally surging profit levels tend to attract the attention of most investors. For growth investors, double-digit earnings growth is highly preferable, as it is often perceived as an indication of strong prospects (and stock price gains) for the company under consideration.
While the historical EPS growth rate for CECO is 8%, investors should actually focus on the projected growth. The company's EPS is expected to grow 73.9% this year, crushing the industry average, which calls for EPS growth of 15.5%.
Impressive Asset Utilization Ratio
Growth investors often overlook asset utilization ratio, also known as sales-to-total-assets (S/TA) ratio, but it is an important feature of a real growth stock. This metric shows how efficiently a firm is utilizing its assets to generate sales.
Right now, CECO has an S/TA ratio of 0.92, which means that the company gets $0.92 in sales for each dollar in assets. Comparing this to the industry average of 0.88, it can be said that the company is more efficient.
In addition to efficiency in generating sales, sales growth plays an important role. And CECO looks attractive from a sales growth perspective as well. The company's sales are expected to grow 22.7% this year versus the industry average of 11.9%.