Blue Nile: Bracing For Earnings (NILE)

Photo of Douglas A. McIntyre
By Douglas A. McIntyre Published
This post may contain links from our sponsors and affiliates, and Flywheel Publishing may receive compensation for actions taken through them.

Blue Nile, Inc. (NASDAQ:NILE) is set to report earnings after the close today, and this one could see severe price volatility after the report.  It isn’t every day that an online jewelry store trades at almost 100-times earnings, even if that is a backward looking number.  The company is around $80.00 in early trading today, and its 52-week trading range is $33.05 to $82.54.

Current estimates from First Call are $0.18 on revenues of $67.15 million.  If it offers guidance the next quarter estimates are $0.14 & $62.9 million and Fiscal Dec-2007 estimates are $0.91 and $306 million.  So it still trades at more than 80-times forward estimates.  The fact that the company has been able to deliver steady upside has helped the incredible performance.

As far as analyst calls, most analysts have price targets south of the current stock price.  The chart is still a bullish one a longer-term basis and depending on your timeframe could allow the stock to drop another $6.00 to $10.00 before any serious technical trouble on a long-term trendline.  Short-term is a much different story, so keep your timeframe in mind.  Options traders are braced for nearly a 10% move in the stock in either direction today, although the open interest has been light in its options.  Shares are up roughly 100% since the start of last quarter.

One last thing to watch for is the good old stock split.  The short interest in July was up again at more than 2.6 million shares, close to 10-days trading volume.  Blue Nile’s market cap is now more than $1.2 Billion after its last run-up. 

Jon C. Ogg
August 6, 2007

Jon Ogg can be reached at [email protected]; he does not own securities in the companies he covers.

Photo of Douglas A. McIntyre
About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

Featured Reads

Our top personal finance-related articles today. Your wallet will thank you later.

Continue Reading

Top Gaining Stocks

CBOE Vol: 1,568,143
PSKY Vol: 12,285,993
STX Vol: 7,378,346
ORCL Vol: 26,317,675
DDOG Vol: 6,247,779

Top Losing Stocks

LKQ
LKQ Vol: 4,367,433
CLX Vol: 13,260,523
SYK Vol: 4,519,455
MHK Vol: 1,859,865
AMGN Vol: 3,818,618