Volume Spike Investor

Stewart Enterprises Inc. (NASDAQ: STEI) is seeing a move of about 2% higher in late morning trading at $6.80 with five minutes until NOON EST.  Interestingly enough the volume surge is nearly twice a normal day’s volume of more than 1.25 million shares, while it trades about 760,000 shares on average.

The reason for today’s volume surge is its earnings report.  Its Q2 earnings report was $0.15 EPS, above the $0.13 estimate; revenues were down marginally by 0.1% year over year at $136.8 million, while estimates were $137.1 million.

Part of the additional underlying interest here may be tied to the CNBC portfolio challenge as this is one of the more active review low priced stocks this week according to that network.

Its market cap is right at $650 million and the 52-week trading range is $5.37 to $9.13.  Twice in the last month its shares have topped 1.6 million shares and it has seen volume over 2 million and 3 million shares in the last 90 days.

Jon Ogg
June 10, 2008