MED vs. HLF, USNA, NUS, NATR, VERU, EL, IPAR, PBH, FARM, and JVA
Should you be buying Medifast stock or one of its competitors? The main competitors of Medifast include Herbalife (HLF), USANA Health Sciences (USNA), Nu Skin Enterprises (NUS), Nature's Sunshine Products (NATR), Veru (VERU), Estée Lauder Companies (EL), Inter Parfums (IPAR), Prestige Consumer Healthcare (PBH), Farmer Bros. (FARM), and Coffee (JVA).
Herbalife (NYSE:HLF) and Medifast (NYSE:MED) are both small-cap retail/wholesale companies, but which is the better stock? We will compare the two companies based on the strength of their institutional ownership, analyst recommendations, valuation, profitability, dividends, community ranking, earnings, media sentiment and risk.
95.5% of Medifast shares are owned by institutional investors. 0.9% of Herbalife shares are owned by company insiders. Comparatively, 2.5% of Medifast shares are owned by company insiders. Strong institutional ownership is an indication that large money managers, endowments and hedge funds believe a company will outperform the market over the long term.
Herbalife has a beta of 1.24, indicating that its stock price is 24% more volatile than the S&P 500. Comparatively, Medifast has a beta of 1.19, indicating that its stock price is 19% more volatile than the S&P 500.
In the previous week, Herbalife had 4 more articles in the media than Medifast. MarketBeat recorded 8 mentions for Herbalife and 4 mentions for Medifast. Medifast's average media sentiment score of 1.09 beat Herbalife's score of 0.63 indicating that Herbalife is being referred to more favorably in the media.
Herbalife received 323 more outperform votes than Medifast when rated by MarketBeat users. Likewise, 67.62% of users gave Herbalife an outperform vote while only 63.94% of users gave Medifast an outperform vote.
Herbalife presently has a consensus target price of $10.50, indicating a potential downside of 2.91%. Medifast has a consensus target price of $53.50, indicating a potential upside of 115.38%. Given Herbalife's stronger consensus rating and higher probable upside, analysts clearly believe Medifast is more favorable than Herbalife.
Herbalife has higher revenue and earnings than Medifast. Medifast is trading at a lower price-to-earnings ratio than Herbalife, indicating that it is currently the more affordable of the two stocks.
Medifast has a net margin of 7.55% compared to Medifast's net margin of 2.70%. Herbalife's return on equity of 36.64% beat Medifast's return on equity.
Summary
Medifast beats Herbalife on 9 of the 17 factors compared between the two stocks.
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This chart shows the number of new MarketBeat users adding MED and its top 5 competitors to their watchlist. Each company is represented with a line over a 90 day period.
This chart shows the average media sentiment of NYSE and its competitors over the past 90 days as caculated by MarketBeat. The averaged score is equivalent to the following: Very Negative Sentiment <= -1.5, Negative Sentiment > -1.5 and <= -0.5, Neutral Sentiment > -0.5 and < 0.5, Positive Sentiment >= 0.5 and < 1.5, and Very Positive Sentiment >= 1.5.
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