Aflac Inc. (NYSE:AFL) shares, rose in value, with the stock price up by 1.26% to the previous day’s close as strong demand from buyers drove the stock to $85.42.
Actively observing the price movement in the last trading, the stock closed the session at $84.36. The value of beta (5-year monthly) was 0.90 whereas the PE ratio was 11.03 over 12-month period. Referring to stock’s 52-week performance, its high was $86.26, and the low was $63.08. On the whole, AFL has fluctuated by 3.97% over the past month.
With the market capitalization of Aflac Inc. currently standing at about $49.15 billion, investors are eagerly awaiting this quarter’s results, scheduled for May 01, 2024. The company’s Forward Dividend Ratio is 1.76, with its dividend yield at 2.06%. 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 $1.59, which is expected to increase to $1.66 for fiscal year $6.46 and then to about $6.92 by fiscal year 2025. Data indicates that the EPS growth is expected to be 3.70% in 2025, while the next year’s EPS growth is forecast to be 7.10%.
Analysts have estimated the company’s revenue for the quarter at $4.32 billion, with a low estimate of $3.97 billion and a high estimate of $4.46 billion. According to the average forecast, sales growth in current quarter could jump down -10.10%, 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 $17.32 billion, representing a decrease of -7.40% 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 AFL’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 50% 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 1.49, with the price of AFL currently trading nearly 1.32% and 4.30% away from the simple moving averages for 20 and 50 days respectively. The Relative Strength Index (RSI, 14) currently indicates a reading of 61.06, while the 7-day volatility ratio is showing 1.46% which for the 30-day chart, stands at 1.36%. Furthermore, Aflac Inc. (AFL)’s beta value is 0.91, and its average true range (ATR) is 1.22.
A comparison of Aflac Inc. (AFL) with its peers suggests the former has fared considerably weaker in the market. AFL showed an intraday change of 1.26% in last session, and over the past year, it grew by 33.66%%.
Data on historical trading for Aflac Inc. (NYSE:AFL) indicates that the trading volumes over the past 10 days have averaged 1.74 million and over the past 3 months, they’ve averaged 2.23 million. According to company’s latest data on outstanding shares, there are 578.48 million shares outstanding.
Nearly 9.84% of Aflac Inc.’s shares belong to company insiders and institutional investors own 60.27% of the company’s shares. The data on short interest also indicates that stock shorts accounted for 11.4 million shares as on Mar 15, 2024, resulting in a short ratio of 4.91. According to the data, the short interest in Aflac Inc. (AFL) stood at 1.98% of shares outstanding as of Mar 15, 2024; the number of short shares registered in Feb 15, 2024 reached 9.27 million. The stock has risen by 3.54% since the beginning of the year, thereby showing the potential of a further growth. This could raise investors’ confidence to be optimistic about the AFL stock heading into the next quarter.
