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The week's question
In March 2025, in the thread "Re: OT, out", Umm asked the members: "Do you think it is because America is made up of magical soil that makes businesses based in America magically profitable?" This week it is put to everyone again. The button below opens the small thread re-asking it - read what others have said so far, then give your own answer as an ordinary reply.
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Stocks A to Z / Stocks K / CarMax (KMX)
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Author: DTB ✶  😊 😞
Number: of 45 
Subject: Q3 (Coming back?)
Date: 01/22/24 4:00 PM
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Bankman actually started the thread on Dec 21st, with a link to the Q3 results: seekingalpha.com - Carmax gaap EPS of beats revenue of 1b misses

They were at $80 pre-market last month after the Q3 report, but the share price has given up all those gains and drifted back to $70, about where it was 5 weeks ago, before the Q3 report.

My read on the Q3 results: nothing very convincingly positive or negative. Unit sales are about stable year over year, down a bit for retail and up a bit for wholesale. Revenues are down a bit because of weaker used car prices, but their margins have remained about $2200 per retail unit and about $1000 per wholesale unit, and they have cut their SG&A expenses a bit, so eps was up year over year from 0.24 to 0.52. Last 12 months earnings were about $500m, and with their market cap of $11b, that means they are trading at a multiple of 22. If they could get back to their pre-COVID $888m in earnings, today's price would represent a multiple of 12.

I have been sitting on the fence. On the plus side: they have a good balance sheet and they are profitable, so they can outlive a lot of their competition, which is suffering with high interest rates limiting affordability. They have historically been a strong grower, they have historically reduced share counts and resumed repurchases last quarter, and they have a long runway of growth with a good business model (fixed prices, relatively fixed reasonable profit margins, growing use of on-line transactions now up to 14% of their sales.) On the negative side, a recovery is already partially priced in and hasn't happened yet, and interest rates may remain high for a long time.

I guess I may have convinced myself to add a little, but I would add a lot if the price dipped back down towards $60, or even under $56, as it did a month after Q2 results.

dtb
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This community has written 45 posts about CarMax. The article-length ones it recommended most:
Q3: didn't seem so awful · 6 recs · 2023
Q1 was pretty good · 3 recs · 2023
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