Delta Air Lines is leading Eco30 gains after a 42% rebound followed by EADS and the Japanese firm Astellas Pharma. The index has grown steadily all year and finished the last quarter well.
Growing 9.4% last quarter, the index was built by elEconomista with collaboration from Stoxx and FactSet, a firm that specializes in market consensus. It covers 30 international stocks selected from a dozen fundamental criteria.
It beat the European stock market average tracked by Stoxx 600, which rose only 5.04%. It fell short of a strong American stock market. The S&P 500 shot up 10% on the quarter.
Since Eco30 was launched, the global index has finished 60% of its sessions with gains and only 25 trading days with losses.
In fact, on March 18 of this year it hit its highest point in its history at 1,132 points after rising 3.25% that month. In February and January of this year it grew 3.09% and 2.8% respectively.
Delta Airlines tops Eco30 index
At the end of the first quarter, some companies fared better on the Eco30 index than others, but twenty-three percent of all firms on the index rose more than 20% with Delta Air Lines leading gains. The company boosted its share price by 42% followed by EADS and the Japanese firm Astellas Pharma, which saw their stock climb 34.6% and 23.3% respectively.
The North American airline was also the fastest climbing stock in the month of March after posting 17.8% gains. And its stock performance is not the only thing shining. Delta has increased its three-year profit margin by 160%.
It finished last year with earnings in excess of 1 billion dollars. For 2013 investment bank averages forecast more than 2.3 billion dollars in profits and experts believe that this figure could grow another 9% in 2014.
This kind of peformance is not trivial considering that Delta has posted a loss for six out of the past ten years. Further, it has one of the highest buy reccomendations on the Eco30 index and is only bested by KDDi and Astellas Pharma in this category.
Poor performers
Not all companies on the Eco30 are having as good of a run as Delta. Gold fell around 5% for the quarter and seems to have lost its shine considering that companies whose businesses depend on the precious metal were seriously affected by its depreciation. Kinross led poor performers and was 16.2% down for the quarter while Rio Tinto fell 15.7%. Goldcorp and Freport-McMoRan shaved 6.0% and 0.6% respectively.
Still, companies with business linked to gold were not the only Eco30 firms with flagging performance. Apple fell 16.8% on the quarter.
But still, the market consensus offers a clear buy reccomendation even if the firm has slowed down in the last several months. The same trend has affected its target price, which has dropped 22.7% to 580 dollars per share.
