No. of Recommendations: 11
About 10% down in pre market.
I bought some Dollar Tree at $64.97. I do hate to ignore a panic.
The stock price may languish for quite a while, but I think it will work out nicely soon enough to offer a decent rate of return. Obviously I am in the minority with that view : )
DG still seems to be the better firm. They don't have the Family Dollar albatross.
For the desperate optimist, the DLTR Q2 press release is not 100% bad. It was nice to see that Dollar Tree saw increasing footfall. Up 1.1% YOY overall, 1.5% at Dollar Tree branded stores. More people coming in the door, the average one spending less, so very much in tune with the key narrative at both chains that the customers themselves just don't have a lot of cash (rather than, say, that they're shopping elsewhere). And gross profit and gross margin were up. And I'm not sure that it means much, but the press release does not contain the word "shrink". The rest of the report is all bad, of course.
They bought back 750k shares at an average price of $121 for 90.8 million, which equals 69% of the quarter's net profit. It's quite impressive that it was such a bad price in hindsight. They must of done the buying in the first two weeks of the quarter (first half May) before the subsequent share price slides, then stopped buying during the slide.
Jim
