Strong price action in the casual dining stocks is being confirmed by sequentially stronger Blackbox Intelligence Data. Blackbox Intelligence Data for May is giving us added confidence in our casual dining longs.
- Casual dining stock have outperformed the S&P 500 by 16% YTD
- Casual dining sales continue to recover in May. Blackbox reported May same-store sales trends of 0.8%, an improvement of 40bps sequentially.
- Traffic declined 1.6% in May versus 1.7% in June
- 2Q sales appear to be on track to meet consensus expectation. Consensus expectations are for the 15 publicly traded companies we track to report 2.8% same store sales in 2Q13 versus 0.8% in 1Q13. The average spread between reported same-store sales SSS and the Blackbox reported numbers over the last 5 quarters has been 200 bps. The current spread is 220bps, with one month left in the quarter.
- Our favorite names in casual dining are EAT, DRI and CAKE
Howard Penney
Managing Director
Rory Green
Analyst