The 52-Week-Low List: 7 Names On Monday
A short list of stocks at their yearly lows includes some large, familiar companies whose businesses are still expanding.
The pain on Monday, August 3, was not concentrated in any single industry. Instead, a brief list of 7 stocks from the Russell 3000 hit their 52-week lows, led by the largest name, GameStop (GME), with a market value of about $8.5 billion. The central question raised by today’s data is what it means when a company’s stock price hits a new low while its underlying business continues to grow.
The full list of names follows.
Monday’s Full 52-Week-Low List
- Where The Buying Ran Strongest: 19 S&P 500 Stocks At 52-Week Highs
- 57 Small Cap Stocks Just Made New 52-Week Highs
- Where The Buying Ran Strongest: 22 Mid Cap Stocks At 52-Week Highs
- 11 Large Cap Stocks Just Made New 52-Week Highs
- S&P 500 Movers | Winners: FSLR, COHR, LITE | Losers: MAR, FICO, EBAY
- Market Movers | Winners: AEMD, HYFM, FUSE | Losers: GYGY, CALC, MIRA
The table below lists every stock at its 52-week low, largest first, with one-day, one-week, one-month, and one-year returns:
| Tickers | Market Cap |
1D % Chg |
1W % Chg |
1M % Chg |
1Y % Chg |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| GME | $8.5 Bil | -12.2% | -11.4% | -16.5% | -15.1% |
| HLI | $8.3 Bil | -0.0% | -11.2% | -10.5% | -33.2% |
| STWD | $5.9 Bil | -0.1% | -3.7% | -3.1% | -8.6% |
| EMAT | $1.8 Bil | -19.4% | -41.2% | -53.4% | n/a |
| GOOS | $0.8 Bil | -1.9% | -3.9% | -8.7% | -20.0% |
| LCLN | $0.7 Bil | -1.7% | -10.1% | -17.0% | n/a |
| METC | $0.5 Bil | -2.9% | -12.5% | -31.3% | -56.3% |
GameStop’s slide contrasts with its revenue growth.
The largest company on the list, GameStop (GME), has declined 16.5% over the last month. Yet its revenue grew 1.6% over the last twelve months, and the stock now trades at 11.2 times trailing earnings with a free cash flow yield of 8.7%. A similar pattern appears in the second-largest name, Houlihan Lokey (HLI), which saw its revenue grow 1.7% over the last twelve months even as its stock declined 10.5% over the last month. Not all slides are equal; the steepest on the list belongs to Evolution Metals & Technologies (EMAT), down 53.4% over the last month.
A low price is a starting point, not a conclusion.
A 52-week-low list is a tool for discovery, not a simple buy signal. A stock at its weakest price of the last year can signal either fundamental damage to a business or a potentially marked-down opportunity in a solid one. The disciplined approach for an investor is to treat the price as an alert. The real work begins after reading the list: checking the health of the business itself before making any decision based on the stock chart.
A 52-week-low list tells you where the pain is; it does not tell you which of these declines are worth buying. That second question is what our Buy the Dip screen answers, every day: beaten-down names where the fundamentals still hold up.
Notice how many of these names sit in one corner of the market: 3 of the 7 are Financials stocks. When a whole group is marked down together, a U.S. broker-dealers & securities exchanges ETF like IAI is one way to own an eventual recovery without betting on which single name survives it best.
Catching Falling Prices Is A Skill. Not Needing To Is A Strategy
Buying stocks at 52-week lows works brilliantly on the survivors and painfully on the rest, and nobody rings a bell to tell you which is which. The honest answer for most investors is to stop needing that call.
The Trefis High Quality (HQ) Portfolio holds roughly 30 businesses selected for the traits that make recoveries likely in the first place: consistent cash generation, strong margins, resilient balance sheets. It has a track record of outpacing a benchmark that combines the three major indices – the S&P 500, S&P Mid-cap, and Russell 2000. Watch the low list for information; let a disciplined basket do the buying.