Banking, finance, and taxes
Do AmEx Shares Deserve a Second Look After Strong Credit Metrics?
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American Express Co. (NYSE: AXP) may deserve a second look after its May credit card statistics. The Dow Jones Industrial Average stock showed very strong results in its credit metrics and in its card loan growth. Results in May showed that the charge-off rate fell to 1.3% from 1.5% in April. Also, the 30-day plus delinquency rate was unchanged at 0.9%.
What investors need to consider here is how battered the shares have been. At $79.25 on Monday’s close, the stock also has a 52-week range is $76.53 to $96.24. The $86.04 consensus price target keeps coming down handily. When we did our bull-bear analysis to come up with the 19,142 expected Dow target for the 2015 peak, AmEx’s consensus target was much higher at $98.71.
24/7 Wall St. wanted to see what outside analyst research was saying about American Express on these results. The reason, again, is because its shares are so bruised. Janney Capital Markets maintained its 2015 and 2016 earnings estimates, but also maintained its Buy rating, on Monday.
Janney’s report said that the charge-off data was better than it expected, and the 1.3% compared to a charge-off rate of 1.6% in May of 2014. Delinquencies of 0.9% are down from the 1.0% in the prior year. Janney’s report also said:
We estimate that in May, dollar charge-offs decreased to $66 million from an estimated $75 million in April. Unless American Express meaningfully lowers its underwriting standards, which we do not expect, we would continue to expect relatively limited volatility in the credit metrics. However, we do expect the charge-rate to increase modestly over the course of the year off of very low levels.
At the end of May, US card-member loans seasonally grew by 249 bps from the end of April, higher than our estimate of 0-100 bps increase. Year over year US card-member loan growth was 7.5%, compared to 7.1% in April 2015. Although year over year loan growth accelerated, we expect the growth rate to moderate in the near term as the Costco US portfolio runs off.
American Express is fighting for the worst and second worst Dow stock of 2015, with its year-to-date performance being -14.3%. Now investors have to wait and see what the trends will be going into interest rate hikes.
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