ANKENY, Iowa - Casey’s General Stores was named Barchart.com’s chart of the day Tuesday for the publicly traded convenience-store chain’s recent spikes in stock price, including an all-time high of $129.53 Tuesday morning.
Barchart chose to highlight Casey’s “first, for the highest number of new highs in the last month, then again for technical buy signals of 80% or better,” the company said.
A wider look at Casey’s stock price shows steady growth since the company went public in 1983 and consistent price boosts since 2010 (see chart below), when Alimentation Couche-Tard made a hostile-takeover effort to acquire the Midwest chain. At that time, Couche-Tard officials claimed Casey’s stock price—about $34 per share—severely undervalued the c-store chain. That unsuccessful effort made Casey’s stock price surge to $45 per share within weeks.
Stock analyst Bonnie Herzog of Wells Fargo Securities recently credited much of Casey’s success in the past year or so to the strength of its fuel business, which it uses “to drive traffic and profit growth while generating strong grocery and prepared food same-store-sales growth through its numerous strategic initiatives.”
She is cautious moving forward, however, as year-over-year comparable sales become more difficult to beat. “With the bar set increasingly higher, we believe there is limited upside potential, and therefore maintain our market perform rating as we believe investors should await more opportunistic entry points,” Herzog said.
Based in Ankeny, Iowa, Casey’s is the leading independently owned convenience-store chain in the Midwest and one of the largest in the country. It owns and operates 1,904 stores in 14 states. In addition to gasoline, Casey’s stores offer a broad selection of products, including made-from-scratch pizza and doughnuts.
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