The impact of the COVID-19 virus has been felt in almost every industry. In some cases the global health crisis has helped boost sales, especially for a number of online retailers and other companies that benefit from people working at home. However, the services offered by online firms have made a big difference.
Three companies that have seen extremely different results since the March low are TripAdvisor (TRIP), Yelp (YELP), and Zillow (Z). If you look at the services offered by these three companies, and if you think about what is happening within the industries they serve, you would be right to assume that Zillow has fared much better than TripAdvisor or Yelp in the last four and a half months.
TripAdvisor serves the travel industry and travel has slowed to a crawl as a result of the virus. Yelp provides reviews of restaurants and other businesses. With the economy coming to a halt or at least partially shutdown in almost all parts of the country, reviews of local businesses and traffic to Yelp has likely declined greatly.
Zillow offers various real estate services including buying and selling of homes, mortgages, and rental services. The real estate industry is changing drastically as a result of the virus and Zillow appears to be benefitting from that fundamental change.
All three of these companies will report earnings on August 6. Looking at Tickeron’s Outlook for the three, the outlook is a positive one. Tickeron has a positive outlook on this group and predicts a further increase by more than 4.00% within the next month with a likelihood of 59%.
The Scorecard shows a strong buy rating on TripAdvisor and buy ratings for both Yelp and Zillow.
The fundamental analysis indicators aren’t great for any of the three stocks. TripAdvisor shows three positive ratings and three negative readings. Yelp show two positive ratings and two negative ratings.
Also in the image above, look at the price changes for the past year. Zillow is up 38.2%, Yelp is down 30.14%, and TripAdvisor is down 47.19%. Since the March bottom in the market Zillow is up over 117% while TripAdvisor and Yelp are up less than 35%. The S&P is up over 47% since March 23.
Looking at the technical analysis screener we see that these three stocks show far more positive ratings. All three stocks have bullish signals from the MACD and Momentum indicators. Zillow and TripAdvisor both have bullish signals from the AROON indicator and Yelp gets a positive reading from the moving averages.
Since the beginning of July, all three stocks have outperformed the overall market and are carrying some upward momentum heading into their earnings reports.
Looking at the current EPS estimates for the three, expectations have been ratcheted down across the board. TripAdvisor was expected to earn $0.01 and is now expected to lose $0.66 per share. That is the biggest adjustment of the three and it marks the biggest change compared to last year.
Three months ago Yelp was expected to lose $0.34 for the quarter and now the expectations are for a loss of $0.51. The company earned $0.16 per share last year, so like TripAdvisor, the expectations are pretty bad.
Zillow has seen the smallest change in the EPS estimate, dropping from an expected loss of $0.36 to a loss of $0.49. The company lost $0.14 per share last year, but that hasn’t kept the stock from rallying.
One area where there seems to be a pretty strong consensus is in the analysts’ ratings. The buy percentage for TripAdvisor is 27.3%, Yelp’s is only 20%, and Zillow’s is 40.9%. The average buy percentage for stocks in general falls between 65% and 75%.
All three companies have short interest ratios that are higher than the average stock. The average ratio falls in the 3.0 range and that means TripAdvisor’s ratio is only slightly higher than average. Yelp and Zillow both show rather high short interest ratios and that could help the stocks move higher should earnings surprise investors in a positive manner. When short sellers have to cover their positions they have to buy the shares. If a stock is already rallying, short covering can add tremendous buying pressure to an already rising stock.
Overall it looks like the technical indicators are pointing to potential short-term gains for these three stocks. The sentiment indicators seem to suggest that any positives out of the earnings reports could help push the stocks higher. With so much bearish sentiment from analysts and short sellers, expectations seem to be pretty low. The fundamentals aren’t all that great for any of these three stocks at this time, but fundamental analysis is more long term in its outlook.
The Moving Average Convergence Divergence (MACD) for YELP turned positive on July 15, 2024. Looking at past instances where YELP's MACD turned positive, the stock continued to rise in of 54 cases over the following month. The odds of a continued upward trend are .
The average fundamental analysis ratings, where 1 is best and 100 is worst, are as follows
a company that hosts an online database of user generated reviews of local businesses
Industry InternetSoftwareServices