Canadian Stocks Profile

Littlefuse Inc. (LFUS) has posted big gains in 2011, recently rebounding from a long-term trend line to jump higher with the market. With four consecutive earnings surprises and rising estimates, this Zacks #1 rank stock is a solid pick for growth. Company Description Littlefuse, Inc. designs and manufactures circuit protection devices for the auto, electronic and electrical markets in the Americas, Europe and Asia. The company was founded in 1927 and has a market cap of $1.4 billion. Littlefuse has been pumping out big gains in 2011, helped by another strong from early May that came in ahead of expectations. First-Quarter Results Revenue for the period was up 16% from last year to $167 million. Earnings also looked good at $1.08, 2% ahead of the Zacks Consensus Estimate, where the company has an average earnings surprise of 7% over the last four quarters. Although the strong top line helped drive the quarter, the company noted that eclipsing a 20% operating margin in the traditionally weak first...

Abercrombie and Fitch (ANF) was one of the first companies with a stable and deterministic share price model estimated in September 2009. This is a company from Services subcategory of the S&P 500 list specialized in apparel stores. We have revisited this model several times since 2009 and always found the same defining variables. The model is based on the decomposition of a share price into a sum of two selected consumer price indices. All models are defined by the (not seasonally adjusted) index of pets, pet products and services (PETS) and the price index of transportation services (TS), as reported by the US BLS. The former CPI component leads the share price by 1 month and the latter is 4 months ahead of the share price. Figure 1 depicts the overall evolution of both involved indices through March 2011.   In this post, we compare the 2009 and 2011 share price models for ANF. For the 2009 model we...