CWS Market Review – February 2, 2024

“Things are never clear until it’s too late.” – Peter Lynch

What a busy week we’ve had! Let’s briefly summarize what happened. At the start of the week, one of our new stocks for this year, McGrath RentCorp, got a buyout offer, causing the stock to gap up 10% on Monday. It continued to rally later in the week.

We also had a Federal Reserve meeting this week. The central bank hinted that it may not be in such a hurry to lower interest rates. The market wasn’t exactly thrilled by that news. On Wednesday, the stock market fell 1.6%, for its worst day since September.

On top of that, we had eight Buy List earnings reports this week. Some of them were very good. Stryker, for example, beat earnings and rallied to a new 52-week high. Cencora topped Wall Street’s earnings forecast by more than 13%. The company also raised its guidance, and the shares jumped 5.5% to reach a new all-time high.

How about little Silgan? This stock struggled last year, but we took a chance by sticking with it for this year, and I’m glad we did. The container company topped earnings by five cents per share and offered optimistic guidance for this year. In two days, Silgan gained more than 6.2%.

Warning: This is going to be a long issue. I’m going to cover all of this week’s earnings reports, and I’ll highlight three Buy List reports we have scheduled for next week. There’s a lot to get to, so let me first bring you up to speed on McGrath and the Federal Reserve.