Earnings from Church & Dwight and Broadridge

Today is another rough day for the market. The S&P 500 is down about as much as it was on Monday.

We had two earnings reports this morning, one good and one bad. Let’s start with the good. Church & Dwight (CHD) earned 55 cents per share for Q4 which matched Wall Street’s estimate. CHD also bumped up its quarterly dividend from 22.75 cents to 24 cents per share. This is their 24th annual dividend increase in a row.

For Q1, C&D expects earnings of 73 cents per share. For all of 2020, the company is looking for earnings of $2.64 to $2.69 per share. That’s an increase of 7% to 9% over 2019. CHD is one of the few stocks in the green today. I saw it was the 7th best-performing stock in the S&P 500 today.

Now for the bad. Broadridge Financial Solutions (BR) reported earnings of 53 cents per share. That was 18 cents below estimates.

What happened? On the earnings call, the CEO said, “Event-driven activity came in significantly below our expectations, leading to a 5% decline in adjusted EPS in a seasonally small quarter. We now expect a lower level of event-driven activity to persist into the second half of fiscal 2020.”

The company stood by its forecast for this fiscal year (ending in June) for EPS growth of 8% to 12%, although now they confess it will be “at the low end.” That range had worked out to $5.03 to $5.22 per share. Now let’s say it’s $5.03 to $5.10 per share.

Shares of BR dropped as much as 11% today but they’ve made up some lost ground.

As I write this, our Buy List is trailing the S&P 500 by 0.09% today. Except for Broadridge, we’d be leading the index by about 0.20%.

Posted by on January 31st, 2020 at 2:49 pm


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