Lazard Inc. (NYSE:LAZ) shares, rose in value, with the stock price up by 0.62% to the previous day’s close as strong demand from buyers drove the stock to $38.98.
Actively observing the price movement in the last trading, the stock closed the session at $38.74. The value of beta (5-year monthly) was 1.45. Referring to stock’s 52-week performance, its high was $42.15, and the low was $25.82. On the whole, LAZ has fluctuated by 4.73% over the past month.
With the market capitalization of Lazard Inc. currently standing at about $3.41 billion, investors are eagerly awaiting this quarter’s results, scheduled for Jan 31, 2024 – Feb 05, 2024. The company’s Forward Dividend Ratio is 2.00, with its dividend yield at 5.13%. As a result, investors might want to see an improvement in the stock’s price before the company announces its earnings report. Analysts are projecting the company’s earnings per share (EPS) to be $0.46, which is expected to increase to $0.81 for fiscal year $3.11 and then to about $4.2 by fiscal year 2025. Data indicates that the EPS growth is expected to be 303.90% in 2025, while the next year’s EPS growth is forecast to be 35.00%.
Analysts have estimated the company’s revenue for the quarter at $623.94 million, with a low estimate of $591 million and a high estimate of $658.05 million. According to the average forecast, sales growth in current quarter could jump up 18.40%, compared to the corresponding quarter of last year. Wall Street analysts also predicted that in 2025, the company’s y-o-y revenues would reach $2.86 billion, representing an increase of 17.20% from the revenues reported in the last year’s results.
Revisions could be a useful indicator to get insight on short-term price movement; so for the company, there were no upward and no downward review(s) in last seven days. We see that LAZ’s technical picture suggests that short-term indicators denote the stock is a 100% Buy on average. However, medium term indicators have put the stock in the category of 100% Buy while long term indicators on average have been pointing out that it is a 100% Buy.
The stock’s technical analysis shows that the PEG ratio is about 0, with the price of LAZ currently trading nearly 0.57% and 0.53% away from the simple moving averages for 20 and 50 days respectively. The Relative Strength Index (RSI, 14) currently indicates a reading of 51.51, while the 7-day volatility ratio is showing 3.95% which for the 30-day chart, stands at 3.14%. Furthermore, Lazard Inc. (LAZ)’s beta value is 1.46, and its average true range (ATR) is 1.33.
A comparison of Lazard Inc. (LAZ) with its peers suggests the former has fared considerably weaker in the market. LAZ showed an intraday change of 0.62% in last session, and over the past year, it grew by 19.94%%.
Data on historical trading for Lazard Inc. (NYSE:LAZ) indicates that the trading volumes over the past 10 days have averaged 1.06 million and over the past 3 months, they’ve averaged 1.13 million. According to company’s latest data on outstanding shares, there are 87.43 million shares outstanding.
Nearly 8.30% of Lazard Inc.’s shares belong to company insiders and institutional investors own 67.36% of the company’s shares. The data on short interest also indicates that stock shorts accounted for 3.1 million shares as on Feb 29, 2024, resulting in a short ratio of 2.47. According to the data, the short interest in Lazard Inc. (LAZ) stood at 3.54% of shares outstanding as of Feb 29, 2024; the number of short shares registered in Jan 31, 2024 reached 1.96 million. The stock has risen by 12.01% since the beginning of the year, thereby showing the potential of a further growth. This could raise investors’ confidence to be optimistic about the LAZ stock heading into the next quarter.
