Which of These Top 5 Entertainment Stocks have the Strongest Earnings Trends: Disney, CBS, Viacom, Comcast or News Corp?

February 10, 2013

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Earnings trends are extremely important when evaluating stocks. At Wall St. Cheat Sheet, we view increasing earnings quarter-over-quarter as a simple way to gauge whether costs and the business model are stable. Then we like to analyze whether the company is outperforming peers in the sector. This is what we call the “E-Squared” investment analysis (‘E = Earnings Are Increasing Quarter-Over-Quarter’ + ‘E = Excellent Relative Performance Versus Peers and Sector’).

Stocks with improving earnings metrics are worthy of your extra attention. Click here to discover our CHEAT SHEET stock picks now!

Here’s your Cheat Sheet to how these top 5 entertainment stocks rank via earnings trends:

Walt Disney Co. (NYSE:DIS): Current Price $54.66

Fiscal Year	2008	2009	2010	2011	2012
Revenue ($) in millions	37,840	36,150	38,060	40,890	42,280
Diluted EPS ($)	2.28	1.76	2.03	2.52	3.13

We see excellent growth from both the revenue and EPS numbers. These successes are have been boosted by highly successful acquisitions.

Next, our CHEAT SHEET investing framework asks us to drill down to the recent quarterly data:

Quarter	Dec. 31, 2011	Mar. 31, 2012	Jun. 30, 2012	Sep. 30, 2012	Dec. 31, 2012
Revenue ($) in millions	10,780	9,629	11,090	10,780	11,340
Diluted EPS ($)	0.80	0.63	1.02	0.68	0.77

Despite the small blip in the quarterly numbers in September 2012, Disney bounced back with far better results in the December 2012 quarter. We’ll keep the company on our list as it has increased earnings quarter-over-quarter…

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