Merck & Co Inc (NYSE:MRK) shares, rose in value, with the stock price up by 0.26% to the previous day’s close as strong demand from buyers drove the stock to $127.99.
Actively observing the price movement in the last trading, the stock closed the session at $127.66. The value of beta (5-year monthly) was 0.38 whereas the PE ratio was 968.15 over 12-month period. Referring to stock’s 52-week performance, its high was $133.10, and the low was $99.14. On the whole, MRK has fluctuated by 3.43% over the past month.
With the market capitalization of Merck & Co Inc currently standing at about $324.15 billion, investors are eagerly awaiting this quarter’s results, scheduled for Apr 25, 2024. The company’s Forward Dividend Ratio is 3.00, with its dividend yield at 2.34%. 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 $2.04, which is expected to increase to $2.35 for fiscal year $8.57 and then to about $9.78 by fiscal year 2025. Data indicates that the EPS growth is expected to be 467.50% in 2025, while the next year’s EPS growth is forecast to be 14.10%.
Analysts have estimated the company’s revenue for the quarter at $15.13 billion, with a low estimate of $14.87 billion and a high estimate of $15.68 billion. According to the average forecast, sales growth in current quarter could jump up 9.80%, 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 $63.83 billion, representing an increase of 6.20% 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 1 upward and no downward review(s) in last seven days. We see that MRK’s technical picture suggests that short-term indicators denote the stock is a 50% 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 14.33, with the price of MRK currently trading nearly 2.17% and 2.06% away from the simple moving averages for 20 and 50 days respectively. The Relative Strength Index (RSI, 14) currently indicates a reading of 56.38, while the 7-day volatility ratio is showing 1.77% which for the 30-day chart, stands at 1.65%. Furthermore, Merck & Co Inc (MRK)’s beta value is 0.41, and its average true range (ATR) is 2.28.
A comparison of Merck & Co Inc (MRK) with its peers suggests the former has fared considerably weaker in the market. MRK showed an intraday change of 0.26% in last session, and over the past year, it grew by 17.61%%.
Data on historical trading for Merck & Co Inc (NYSE:MRK) indicates that the trading volumes over the past 10 days have averaged 8.44 million and over the past 3 months, they’ve averaged 8.54 million. According to company’s latest data on outstanding shares, there are 2.53 billion shares outstanding.
Nearly 0.15% of Merck & Co Inc’s shares belong to company insiders and institutional investors own 78.68% of the company’s shares. The data on short interest also indicates that stock shorts accounted for 23.16 million shares as on Mar 15, 2024, resulting in a short ratio of 2.41. According to the data, the short interest in Merck & Co Inc (MRK) stood at 0.91% of shares outstanding as of Mar 15, 2024; the number of short shares registered in Feb 15, 2024 reached 16.82 million. The stock has risen by 17.40% since the beginning of the year, thereby showing the potential of a further growth. This could raise investors’ confidence to be optimistic about the MRK stock heading into the next quarter.
