Wednesday February 15th on Fast Money we discussed some unusual Options Action in Home Depot (HD) which hit a new high of 142.66 today. An opening buyer paid .42 for 1,332 March 150 calls. Ultimately ~ 2,000 of these traded. That trader is betting on 6% upside in Home Depot over the coming month. Home Depot reports earnings Tuesday February 21st. Did this trader’s options bet make sense?
The Home Depot is the world’s largest home improvement retailer, selling building materials and home improvement and lawn and garden products. The company also offers home improvement services. With nearly 400,000 employees and more than 2,200 stores in the U.S., Canada, and Mexico, a typical store averages 105,000 square feet of indoor retail space with 35,000 products. The growing e-commerce business offers more than one million products for online purchases, and many purchasers arrange for in-store pickup. Customers include “do-it-yourselfers,” professional contractors, as well as customers who by both products and services via their installation business. Although professional customers represent only 3% of the total customer base, they represent 40% of gross revenues, and as such the company focuses heavily on this important group of customers. (Source Home Depot Investor Relations)
Historically big box retailers have focused on two key areas for growth, increasing same-store sales (which in turn can also improve margins) and increasing the number of locations. While this was certainly Home Depot’s strategy in the early years, more recently they have focused on online sales. Consequently, the company has seen sales growth and broader margins in recent years even as many other retailers contracted as consumers migrated increasingly to online purchases. For example, while the 2,274 store locations as of January 31, 2016, was the same as it was six years earlier in January of 2010, revenues grew ~34% over that period. Earnings grew from 1.67 per share in the 12 months ended January 2010 to 6.20 per share last year. Granted 2010 was in the throws of the housing crisis, but even compared to the pre-credit crisis peak earnings of 2.72 per share in 2006, the growth in roughly the same number of locations is impressive and enviable. Lowe’s, Home Depot’s largest competitor, also experienced impressive growth over the same period, however, to do so their store count grew nearly 9% over the same time frame. Additionally, their sales per retail square footage of $293 in the most recent fiscal year are substantially lower than the $374 Home Depot achieved curing the same period.
Online sales represented 5.6% of total revenues in the most recently reported quarter, up 17% from the prior quarter; impressive considering many of the company’s products require a forklift. That may explain why 40% of those online purchases were picked up in the store, a statistic management cited in their 3Q2016 conference call as confirmation of the synergy between their online and bricks and mortar strategies. A history of consistently delivering impressive growth and regular dividend increases helps explain Wall Street’s bullish sentiment. Of the 36 analysts surveyed by Bloomberg, there are 22 buys, 11 holds, and no sells (the remaining analysts surveyed did not issue buy/sell recommendations). One of the top-ranked analysts, Christopher Horvers of J.P. Morgan reaffirmed his bullish “overweight” rating today (February 15th) with a $149 price target, but there’s the rub. Mr. Horvers target is less than 5% above the current stock price.
Even with the stock trading at all-time highs, bulls could point to fundamentals; 7 consecutive years of double-digit earnings growth and high single-digit revenue growth even as other big-box retailers such as Walmart and Target have had none. For a retailer, the margins are enviable and growing. For comparison in 2010 Target had net income margins of roughly 4%, the same as they do today. Home Depot which had similar net margins of 4.3% in 2010 have seen those margins nearly double to 8.3%. Although it is a fair criticism to suggest Home Depot does not compete directly with Target, in many areas they do compete directly with another big and storied retailer, Sears. Both sell tools, home appliances, lawn and garden equipment and to a small extent, auto supplies. Since 2010 Sears sales have fallen by half, net margins of just .6% in 2010 and .2% in 2011, have been negative every year since. Sales per retail square footage at Sears of 128.56 (and declining fast) are roughly one-third those of Home Depot. These companies sell the same appliances, so product differentiation did not apply here. Craftsman branded tools at Sears (recently sold to Stanley Black & Decker) have historically enjoyed more cache than the Husky branded tools at Home Depot. So the outperformance of one versus the other is largely one of better management and operations, at least in the segments where these businesses compete. At less than 20x forward earnings, with 15-20% EPS growth, propelled by a strong housing market, good management, improving margins and increasing market share versus poorly managed competitors such as Sears, the bulls have a reasonable case. The company is growing earnings faster than the S&P 500 yet trades at a discount to it. Technically it looks good too, hitting an all-time closing high today. A reversal would be a warning sign, but we have not seen one yet. To anyone who is buying the stock today, it might seem to be an all clear. On the macroeconomic front, home price appreciation, housing turnover, household formation and an aging housing stock are also tailwinds for their business.
The cracks in the bull case are that the equity bull market is long in the tooth. Interest rates are rising, and as they do, that could crimp both home price appreciation and turnover. While it is true that Home Depot’s multiples look reasonable in the context of S&P 500 multiples all are well above average. At historical multiples for Home Depot, which existed while the company enjoyed similar growth, Home Depot would be 15% – 30% cheaper than it is today. The lower end of that range would price. Even if 10-year rates remain steady thus minimizing the impact on mortgage rates tied to them at historically low levels, inflation fears could raise the short-end of the curve. An inverted yield curve has historically slowed economic growth, and the rhetoric of pro-growth Trump is unproven.
Options are currently pricing in a one-day earnings related move of 2.4% when the company report results from next Tuesday, February 21st. That is smaller than the historical average move of almost 2.9%. Put simply; options are cheap. Today’s activity could be an effort to make a cheap bet that the rally could continue, with earnings as the catalyst to propel it to new heights. My counterpoint would be that the one month move following earnings is usually small, roughly 4.5%.
Consequently, if I was inclined to use options to press bullish bets – a strategy I vastly favor over buying the stock here – I would use options closer to at-the-money, and might even consider call spreads. While we usually talk about using “regular” expirations on Options Action (those that occur on the third Friday of every month), one of the advantages of weekly options is that there are often more strikes available. In Home Depot’s case, weekly options have “dollar strikes” whereas the regular options have strikes $5 apart. For example, one could spend ~ $2 to buy the March 31st expiration 143/150 call spread. (Prices are ~ 2.60 and .60 respectively). Options will have a slight “vol suck” after earnings are announced as options decay once the event has passed; the short 150 calls would help mitigate that. Additionally, since a 6% move over the ensuing month following earnings is unusual, the 150s have only a 20% probability of being in play.
