Growth investors focus on stocks that are seeing above-average financial growth, as this feature helps these securities garner the market’s attention and deliver solid returns. But finding a great growth stock is not easy at all.
In addition to volatility, these stocks carry above-average risk by their very nature. Also, one could end up losing from a stock whose growth story is actually over or nearing its end.
However, the task of finding cutting-edge growth stocks is made easy with the help of the Zacks Growth Style Score (part of the Zacks Style Scores system), which looks beyond the traditional growth attributes to analyze a company’s real growth prospects.
Our proprietary system currently recommends First Financial Bancorp (FFBC) as one such stock. This company not only has a favorable Growth Score, but also carries a top Zacks Rank.
Studies have shown that stocks with the best growth features consistently outperform the market. And for stocks that have a combination of a Growth Score of A or B and a Zacks Rank #1 (Strong Buy) or 2 (Buy), returns are even better.
Here are three of the most important factors that make the stock of this holding company for First Financial Bank a great growth pick right now.
Earnings Growth
Arguably nothing is more important than earnings growth, as surging profit levels is what most investors are after. For growth investors, double-digit earnings growth is highly preferable, as it is often perceived as an indication of strong prospects (and stock price gains) for the company under consideration.
While the historical EPS growth rate for First Financial is 6.8%, investors should actually focus on the projected growth. The company’s EPS is expected to grow 9.2% this year, crushing the industry average, which calls for EPS growth of 7.4%.
Impressive Asset Utilization Ratio
Growth investors often overlook asset utilization ratio, also known as sales-to-total-assets (S/TA) ratio, but it is an important feature of a real growth stock. This metric shows how efficiently a firm is utilizing its assets to generate sales.
Right now, First Financial has an S/TA ratio of 0.07, which means that the company gets $0.07 in sales for each dollar in assets. Comparing this to the industry average of 0.06, it can be said that the company is more efficient.
While the level of efficiency in generating sales matters a lot, so does the sales growth of a company. And First Financial is well positioned from a sales growth perspective too. The company’s sales are expected to grow 19.7% this year versus the industry average of 9.4%.