Thanksgiving is here, marking the start of the 2024 end-of-the-year holiday season – and what better time to get your stock portfolio in order for the coming year?
Investors get into the market for a whole range of reasons, and bring their own array of skills and opinions, but the end goal is always the same: to generate a return and realize a profit.
That requires good stock-picking, and the Smart Score tool is available to smooth out that process. The Smart Score is a data collection and sorting tool, developed by TipRanks to make use of AI and natural language processing in gathering and sorting the data generated by the stock market – all of the data, put up by thousands of traders dealing in thousands of stocks, for tens of millions of daily transactions.
The Smart Score uses this data to rate every stock against a set of factors that have proven to be sound predictors of future outperformance. Each stock is given a simple score, on a scale of 1 to 10, with the ‘Perfect 10’ indicating stocks that definitely deserve a discriminating stock picker’s attention.
So, let’s make good use of the Smart Score, and take a look at two top-scoring stocks to watch as 2024 wraps up.
Delta Airlines (DAL)
We’ll start in the airline business. Delta Airlines, with its market cap of more than $41 billion, is the largest player in the industry. The company employs 100,000 people and, from its Atlanta headquarters and hub, it oversees a network that encompasses over 4,000 daily flights to 280 destinations across the globe. Delta connects such major regional and international hubs as Boston, New York, LA, Mexico City, Seoul-Inchon, Tokyo, London, and Amsterdam.
Delta operates a fleet of nearly 1,000 aircraft – 992 as of November 25 this year – on its routes, including some of the airline industry’s largest and smallest commercial passenger jets. The company has a history of preferring Boeing jets, but in recent years has been increasing the Airbus liners in its fleet. In the last reported quarter, 3Q24, Delta took delivery of 27 new airliners. In addition, the company announced that in 2025 it will offer over 700 weekly flights to more than 33 destinations and will inaugurate 7 new routes.
That said, looking at the last quarter’s financial results, we find that Delta missed at both the top and bottom lines. Revenue came in at $14.59 billion, relatively flat year-over-year and $700 million below the forecast. At the bottom line, Delta’s non-GAAP EPS came to $1.50, missing the estimates by a nickel. On a more positive note, Delta had an operating cash flow in the quarter of $1.3 billion, and the quarterly free cash flow of $95 million fed into the year-to-date FCF total of $2.7 billion.
