I guess we are not talking about explosive growth, but March was pretty strong and certainly improved sequentially.
Following up to our positive regional gaming note on 3/28/11, state gaming revenue releases have so far confirmed our positive assertions. Illinois, Indiana, Missouri, and Iowa are in and with the exception of the perpetual laggard Illinois, March was a strong month for regional gaming. Our two favorite names our PNK and ASCA and both are poised to beat Q1 estimates quite handily in our opinion.
We are making it a habit to look at sequential revenue adjusted for seasonality instead of just looking at YoY growth given the extreme volatility over the past few years. March 2011 was clearly a solid month on a YoY basis but more importantly was a step up sequentially.
The following charts show the recent trends of the mature regional gaming markets that have already released March gaming revenues. We show actual gaming revenues as well as what was predicted by our model for each month based on the previous 3 months, adjusted for historical seasonality. As can be seen, March was a much stronger month than the model prediction, indicating fairly significant sequential improvement in each of the markets presented.
