Bidness Etc - Bed Bath & Beyond Rating and stock price update by Zacks’ and other research firms

Zacks reiterate its hold rating to the stock of Bed Bath and beyond

Bed Bath and Beyond stock once again received Hold rating from Zacks on Monday. Analyst at Zacks’ research firm wrote, “Bed Bath & Beyond posted solid third-quarter fiscal 2014 results, following which the company raised its earnings forecast for fiscal 2014. We are impressed with the company’s focus on strategic initiatives, including store expansion, enhancement of e-commerce capabilities and improvisation of customer services”.

Moreover, the debt free financial statements of the company are continuously creating space to provide more visibility to support future development. Though, the merchandise retail stores’ profit margin that has been adversely affected by an increase in interest expense and rise in net direct to customer shipping cost is still a distress for the company. Together with that it endures to witness macroeconomic headwinds.

Various analysts from different equity research firms have also written about the stock. Oppenheimer escalated its rating to Outperform from market perform and elevated the price objective to $85 from $69 on Monday. Canaccord Genuity research firm re-stated its Buy rating and assigned $88 price target to the stock of BBBY on Sunday. Standard and poor research demoted BBBY stock to Hold with $88 target price on Friday. In the end, Goldman Sachs set $73 price target with a rating of Sell in a research note on Friday. Sell rating by four analysts has been given to the stock along with ten hold and six buy ratings plus an overall price target of $72.62.

The Stock of Bed Bath and Beyond stood at $76.43 at market close on Monday. The retailer has a 52 week high and low of $79.64 and $54.96 respectively. It also had 200 day and 50 day moving average of $71 and $65 with $13.91 billion of market cap and 15.46 P/E ratios.

The company announced its last quarter results on 8th January Thursday. The retailer posted earnings of $1.23 per share for the previous quarter thrashing the consensus projections of $1.19 per share by 4 cents. Talking about revenue, it was able to pocket revenue of $2.94 billion in the parallel quarter. In the comparable quarter last year, BBBY dispatched earnings of $1.12 per share. Its revenue went up by 2.7% when linked with revenue performance of the same quarter prior year. Overall, according to the estimation by analysts Bed Bath and Beyond will report an EPS of 45.05 per share for the ongoing year of 2015.

Bed Bath & Beyond Inc. and holdings is a retailer which functions under the names BBBY, Christmas Tree Shop.