With profit margin at all-time highs, Cat stock could be ready to roar — or get its tail stepped on.
With 61% gains racked up over the last 52 weeks, Caterpillar (CAT -0.55%) shares have outperformed the rest of the S&P 500 by a factor of nearly three — and one analyst thinks this run’s not done.
On Tuesday, JPMorgan‘s Tami Zakaria set a $435 price target on Caterpillar stock, making her the second-most-optimistic analyst on Wall Street. (Jefferies‘ Stephen Volkmann, with a $440 target price, has the current Street-high target for Cat.) But what is it about Caterpillar, exactly, that has these analysts lining up to endorse this construction stock?
Is Caterpillar stock a buy?
It’s not the economy. In fact, Zakaria writes in a note covered by TheFly.com that “construction data points are mixed.” Then again, Caterpillar may not need to produce gee-whiz numbers to prove her right in rating the stock a buy.
At last report, analysts are only expecting Caterpillar to post 5.1% sales growth in for the first quarter (about $16 billion in revenue), and earnings only need to rise 3.7% (to $5.09 per share) to keep Wall Street happy. Longer-term expectations are similarly muted, with analysts forecasting only half a percent of earnings growth this year, and a 5.6% increase in 2025. With Zakaria predicting “resilient margins,” it shouldn’t take much sales expansion for Cat to beat those predictions.
And margins are rising. At 20.4%, Cat’s operating profit margin is already a full one-third better than the 15% margin it was posting pre-pandemic. My worry is that a 20% margin is way out of line with the company’s historical performance, which has tended to max out around 10% profitability. To me, this suggests that its margin is approaching (or has already reached) a cyclical peak — and is due for a reversion to the mean.
If I’m right about this, then a strong margin for Caterpillar is actually more of a warning sign than a reason for optimism. History may not repeat itself exactly, but it does usually rhyme. It may be time for Caterpillar investors to take their profits and find a better bargain.
JPMorgan Chase is an advertising partner of The Ascent, a Motley Fool company. Rich Smith has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends JPMorgan Chase and Jefferies Financial Group. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.
