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Is Party City (PRTY) a Great Value Stock Right Now?

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Here at Zacks, we focus on our proven ranking system, which places an emphasis on earnings estimates and estimate revisions, to find winning stocks. But we also understand that investors develop their own strategies, so we are constantly looking at the latest trends in value, growth, and momentum to find strong companies for our readers.

Of these, perhaps no stock market trend is more popular than value investing, which is a strategy that has proven to be successful in all sorts of market environments. Value investors rely on traditional forms of analysis on key valuation metrics to find stocks that they believe are undervalued, leaving room for profits.

Zacks has developed the innovative Style Scores system to highlight stocks with specific traits. For example, value investors will be interested in stocks with great grades in the "Value" category. When paired with a high Zacks Rank, "A" grades in the Value category are among the strongest value stocks on the market today.

One stock to keep an eye on is Party City . PRTY is currently sporting a Zacks Rank of #2 (Buy) and an A for Value. The stock is trading with P/E ratio of 8.87 right now. For comparison, its industry sports an average P/E of 24.84. Over the last 12 months, PRTY's Forward P/E has been as high as 526.09 and as low as -480.73, with a median of 13.07.

Value investors also use the P/S ratio. The P/S ratio is is calculated as price divided by sales. This is a popular metric because sales are harder to manipulate on an income statement, so they are often considered a better performance indicator. PRTY has a P/S ratio of 0.35. This compares to its industry's average P/S of 0.94.

These figures are just a handful of the metrics value investors tend to look at, but they help show that Party City is likely being undervalued right now. Considering this, as well as the strength of its earnings outlook, PRTY feels like a great value stock at the moment.

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