Tumbling to a price of $29.15 during today's afternoon trading session, shares of First Financial Bankshares are now -12.54% below their average target price of $33.33. Does this mean the stock will reverse course? Analysts are giving FFIN an average rating of hold and target prices ranging from 28.0 to 36.0 dollars per share.
To understand the market's outlook on the stock, we can look at First Financial Bankshares's short interest: the proportion of the share float that is tied to short positions. Behind each short position is an investor who believes that the stock will decline in the future. Here, the stock's short interest is 6.9% which means the outlook is split.
When a stock is sold short, it means an investor has borrowed shares of the stock from their broker, and then sold them at the going market price. The investor hopes for the price to decline, so that they might buy those shares back at a lower price in the future. Once they do, they can return the borrowed shares to their broker, and keep the profit they made on the transaction.
Another way to gauge the sentiment on First Financial Bankshares is to look at the percentage of institutions that are invested in the stock. In this case, 61.0% of the shares are held by pension, mutual, and hedge funds, which shows that these institutions probably have strong confidence in the stock.
If institutions are invested in a particular stock, it shows in most cases that they have performed quality research and concluded that it is a good investment. In some cases, however, increases in institutional ownership could be a sign of a takeover attempt or proxy fight, which can actually injure share prices. Also, institutions are not infallible, and can certainly make miscalculations -- often with spectacular results.
To sum up, First Financial Bankshares is probably the subject of mixed market sentiment because of an analyst consensus of some upside potential, a hold rating, an average amount of shares sold short, and an average number of institutional investors. At Market Inference, we believe that any investment decision should be preceded by an in-depth analysis of the company's fundamental values and a comparison with similar stocks.
Here's a snapshot of some important facts to keep in mind about FFIN:
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The stock has trailing 12 month earnings per share (EPS) of $1.64
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First Financial Bankshares has a trailing 12 month Price to Earnings (P/E) ratio of 17.8 compared to the S&P 500 average of 15.97
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The company has a Price to Book (P/B) ratio of 3.3 in contrast to the S&P 500's average ratio of 2.95
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First Financial Bankshares is a Finance company, and the sector average P/E and P/B ratios are 14.34 and 1.57 respectively
