NWN vs. NJR, NFG, SR, HE, KEN, VEON, SJW, TDS, IDT, and TAC
Should you be buying Northwest Natural stock or one of its competitors? The main competitors of Northwest Natural include New Jersey Resources (NJR), National Fuel Gas (NFG), Spire (SR), Hawaiian Electric Industries (HE), Kenon (KEN), VEON (VEON), SJW Group (SJW), Telephone and Data Systems (TDS), IDT (IDT), and TransAlta (TAC). These companies are all part of the "utilities" sector.
Northwest Natural (NYSE:NWN) and New Jersey Resources (NYSE:NJR) are both utilities companies, but which is the better stock? We will compare the two businesses based on the strength of their risk, media sentiment, community ranking, profitability, institutional ownership, dividends, earnings, analyst recommendations and valuation.
Northwest Natural pays an annual dividend of $1.95 per share and has a dividend yield of 5.1%. New Jersey Resources pays an annual dividend of $1.68 per share and has a dividend yield of 3.8%. Northwest Natural pays out 75.0% of its earnings in the form of a dividend, suggesting it may not have sufficient earnings to cover its dividend payment in the future. New Jersey Resources pays out 68.9% of its earnings in the form of a dividend.
New Jersey Resources has a net margin of 13.96% compared to Northwest Natural's net margin of 7.84%. New Jersey Resources' return on equity of 11.13% beat Northwest Natural's return on equity.
Northwest Natural presently has a consensus price target of $45.20, indicating a potential upside of 18.51%. New Jersey Resources has a consensus price target of $45.00, indicating a potential upside of 3.00%. Given Northwest Natural's higher possible upside, equities research analysts plainly believe Northwest Natural is more favorable than New Jersey Resources.
75.1% of Northwest Natural shares are owned by institutional investors. Comparatively, 71.0% of New Jersey Resources shares are owned by institutional investors. 0.8% of Northwest Natural shares are owned by insiders. Comparatively, 0.8% of New Jersey Resources shares are owned by insiders. Strong institutional ownership is an indication that endowments, large money managers and hedge funds believe a stock will outperform the market over the long term.
New Jersey Resources has higher revenue and earnings than Northwest Natural. Northwest Natural is trading at a lower price-to-earnings ratio than New Jersey Resources, indicating that it is currently the more affordable of the two stocks.
New Jersey Resources received 49 more outperform votes than Northwest Natural when rated by MarketBeat users. Likewise, 57.22% of users gave New Jersey Resources an outperform vote while only 52.41% of users gave Northwest Natural an outperform vote.
Northwest Natural has a beta of 0.57, suggesting that its share price is 43% less volatile than the S&P 500. Comparatively, New Jersey Resources has a beta of 0.64, suggesting that its share price is 36% less volatile than the S&P 500.
In the previous week, New Jersey Resources had 1 more articles in the media than Northwest Natural. MarketBeat recorded 5 mentions for New Jersey Resources and 4 mentions for Northwest Natural. Northwest Natural's average media sentiment score of 1.02 beat New Jersey Resources' score of 0.51 indicating that Northwest Natural is being referred to more favorably in the media.
Summary
New Jersey Resources beats Northwest Natural on 12 of the 18 factors compared between the two stocks.
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This chart shows the number of new MarketBeat users adding NWN and its top 5 competitors to their watchlist. Each company is represented with a line over a 90 day period.
This chart shows the average media sentiment of NYSE and its competitors over the past 90 days as caculated by MarketBeat. The averaged score is equivalent to the following: Very Negative Sentiment <= -1.5, Negative Sentiment > -1.5 and <= -0.5, Neutral Sentiment > -0.5 and < 0.5, Positive Sentiment >= 0.5 and < 1.5, and Very Positive Sentiment >= 1.5.
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