Manulife Financial Corp. (NYSE:MFC) shares, rose in value, with the stock price up by 0.37% to the previous day’s close as strong demand from buyers drove the stock to $24.39.
Actively observing the price movement in the last trading, the stock closed the session at $24.30. The value of beta (5-year monthly) was 1.10 whereas the PE ratio was 12.61 over 12-month period. Referring to stock’s 52-week performance, its high was $25.14, and the low was $17.07. On the whole, MFC has fluctuated by 1.84% over the past month.
With the market capitalization of Manulife Financial Corp. currently standing at about $44.05 billion, investors are eagerly awaiting this quarter’s results, scheduled for May 08, 2024. The company’s Forward Dividend Ratio is 1.10, with its dividend yield at 4.52%. 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 $0.68, which is expected to increase to $0.67 for fiscal year $2.75 and then to about $2.96 by fiscal year 2025. Data indicates that the EPS growth is expected to be 7.00% in 2025, while the next year’s EPS growth is forecast to be 7.60%.
Analysts have estimated the company’s revenue for the quarter at $1.47 billion, with a low estimate of $1.47 billion and a high estimate of $1.47 billion. According to the average forecast, sales growth in current quarter could jump down -76.20%, 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 $50.61 billion, representing an increase of 104.30% 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 MFC’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 4.44, with the price of MFC currently trading nearly 0.58% and 3.56% away from the simple moving averages for 20 and 50 days respectively. The Relative Strength Index (RSI, 14) currently indicates a reading of 54.92, while the 7-day volatility ratio is showing 1.98% which for the 30-day chart, stands at 1.57%. Furthermore, Manulife Financial Corp. (MFC)’s beta value is 1.07, and its average true range (ATR) is 0.41.
A comparison of Manulife Financial Corp. (MFC) with its peers suggests the former has fared considerably weaker in the market. MFC showed an intraday change of 0.37% in last session, and over the past year, it grew by 32.27%%.
Data on historical trading for Manulife Financial Corp. (NYSE:MFC) indicates that the trading volumes over the past 10 days have averaged 3.21 million and over the past 3 months, they’ve averaged 3.40 million. According to company’s latest data on outstanding shares, there are 1.81 billion shares outstanding.
Nearly 0.09% of Manulife Financial Corp.’s shares belong to company insiders and institutional investors own 52.02% of the company’s shares. The data on short interest also indicates that stock shorts accounted for 11.31 million shares as on Mar 15, 2024, resulting in a short ratio of 2.89. According to the data, the short interest in Manulife Financial Corp. (MFC) stood at 0.63% of shares outstanding as of Mar 15, 2024; the number of short shares registered in Feb 15, 2024 reached 37.75 million. The stock has risen by 10.36% since the beginning of the year, thereby showing the potential of a further growth. This could raise investors’ confidence to be optimistic about the MFC stock heading into the next quarter.
