Hitting 52 week lows at 47/share. Should I buy into it for longer term (12 months) solid investment or am I looking to catch a falling knife?

Is it down on fundamentals, economical or just technical?

 

It's currently below the 200, 50, and 10 day moving average which means its technically weak. However, looks like its got great support level at $45 for the past 6 years. So you may have nearly caught the bottom but not quite yet. Relative Strength for 10 years suggests the stock hasn't been this weak since Jan '96.

Walmart is pretty much a bellweather for PPI, CPI, consumer goods, retail spending activity benchmarks of the country. Any positive signs of sustained economic recovery will also pick this stock up.

 

to risky, overall very weak, don't try and call the bottom, let the stock give you some sign of life first. This isn't a day trading stock so if your looking to hold it long term, you can wait to see if its the bottom or not.

 

Yeah, I would look to buy for long term. This is definetly a bellwhether stock but I believe in buying when things are out of favor. I also would like to get before big funds start buying it up again because it is so weak.

 

you could alway take the chance, i mean its not like its going to drop to zero, so hey you buy it hear and then it goes down a little more no big lose

 

well, it's not a cheap stock so I will need at least 5k to get into it and if I take a loss not sure if I can let them money just sit there. Timing wise it's not the best but the stocks looks technically cheap.

However, it's basically a proxy for consumer spending. So I guess the anticipation is for the consumer to spend less, thus the dive, but I think it's short term.

 

I assume that the ecomonic figures released today are too blame? Walmart sells lots of durable goods, the same ones that were not produced at levels that were being predicted.

 

Good wal-mart article



BACK WHEN WINTER was in full chill, we wrote a brief item on Wal-Mart. The gist of it was that the company, as a wise pal of ours put it, was "a great story topping out." The stock was changing hands at slightly above 51; Our friend, who's a chart fancier (but a very decent sort nonetheless) suggested that if it broke much below 50-51, roughly its then 18-month trough, it was in for trouble. Just how far down would it go?, we remember asking. And he smiled and shrugged. (Did we neglect to say our friend could be frustratingly enigmatic?)

He did point out that the company's formidable size and corporate reach could easily make the action of its stock a barometer for the consumer, the economy and the market. And in many ways, the shares, which have spent a lot of time recently in the 40s, have indeed been a barometer, particularly for the market.

Wal-Mart, the biggest retailer on the face of the planet, naturally came to mind as we were mulling the prospects of a consumer slowdown and the air seeping out of the credit bubble. The company already has been feeling a bit of pain, as the uninspiring performance of its stock intimates. Its customers, management often stresses, live paycheck to paycheck, and paychecks have been somewhat paltry the past few years.

Moreover, its customers often are off in the boonies and driving is their only means of getting from where they are to where they have to go, so they're highly sensitive to soaring gas prices. And the company is prone to cite those prices in shrugging off disappointing performance.

Wal-Mart has been growing, to be sure, but not at the brisk pace its many fans on the Street had grown accustomed to. What's more, there's reason to suspect that its trademark double-digit sales gains may be a thing of the past. And not just because towering fuel prices might be with us for longer than we like to think.

On this score, Jon Jacobs, who's the fixed-income maven at Cantor Fitzgerald and a shrewd scanner of the investment scene generally, offers some intriguing observations on what's in store for Wal-Mart. Jacobs holds that beyond the impact of gas prices, the company is vulnerable on several fronts to the possible further detriment of its sales, earnings and stock valuation.

More specifically, he zeroes in on four factors, three of them fundamental. Let's start with the one that isn't -- what the company calls "headline risk." As noted, Wal-Mart has been quite adept at attracting negative publicity, which management is actively striving to counter via ads and a PR blitz. Jacobs wonders, though, if investors sense that "after decades of successfully toughing it out against both labor unions and communities trying to restrict 'big-box' expansion" the company may be in for rougher going.

As he dryly notes, whether Wal-Mart "can continue employing the nuclear option against unionization at the same time it tries to burnish its image as a good corporate citizen is an open question."

Turning to his fundamental concerns, Jacobs raises questions as to how vigorously Wal-Mart can continue to grow, even apart from the so-called headline risks. How much can the company expand and how much more market share can it wrest away from the competition when it already boasts nearly half of total U.S. chain-store sales? "No one," he reflects, "can grow twice as fast as GDP forever."

Jacobs also worries that the increasing shift of Wal-Mart's overall sales mix toward groceries, a "notoriously low-margin business," will chip away at the company's overall profit margins.

Finally, he cites reservations that the "international growth story is not as rosy as Wal-Mart's past numbers and pronouncements indicate." A sizable chunk of international sales gains the past two years he traces to the favorable currency-translation impact of a falling U.S. dollar (which, for the moment, has stopped falling). Last fiscal year, the company reported foreign business, which chips in some 20% of the whole, rose a rousing 18.3%. However, strip away the benign effect of a devaluing dollar and the rise shrinks to 11.6%, or not much different from the gain in total corporate sales.

All of which explains why Wal-Mart shares have been trending lower for quite a spell now and why earlier this month they sagged below $50 for the first time in two years and touched a new low last Friday. (The P/E, we calculate, is around 17). Since none of these drags is apt to vanish any time soon, Jacobs reasonably anticipates they'll continue to weigh on the stock.

 

This article tells me that I am wrong the market is right. With some rosy news it can go up, but pull back is always more likely than a run up.

 

I bought some today @ $46.50 ... hoping it's not a mistake.

I read this article

I plan on keeping this stock for a while. Two year low!