Practice Mode
Costco · November 2016
COSTEveryday essentials3-year horizonEasy
Imagine you already own shares of this company.
Everything on this page is limited to information available on November 1, 2016.
The situation
- Date
- November 1, 2016
- You own
- Shares of Costco
- Period
- 3 years, until November 2019
Decide what to do with your shares.
The company at the time
Costco runs membership warehouse stores that sell goods in bulk at low markups. It keeps only about two cents of profit from each dollar of sales, and a large part of that profit comes from the yearly fees its members pay; most members renew every year. Sales grew only about 2% in fiscal 2016, partly because lower gasoline prices reduced its fuel sales. In June it switched its store credit card from American Express to Visa and Citi. Free cash flow was unusually low that year, as cash from its operations dipped while it kept spending on new warehouses. Investors paid a P/E of about 27 for its steadiness.
Information available at the time
The same numbers as on company pages, as they had been reported by November 1, 2016. Sector medians aren't shown because StockLab doesn't have them as they stood back then.
Revenue, growth, profit and cash flow are for fiscal year 2016 (ended August 2016), the latest full year in an annual report filed by then; cash and debt come from the latest report (its date is on the card). Results announced after that aren't in these cards yet, even if the story above mentions them, so their numbers can differ.
Click any metric to see what it means.Tap any metric to see what it means.
$146.66
Close on Nov 1, 2016
$64.1B
5-year trends
Annual figures, fiscal years 2012-2016.
Stock price
Useful context, but not the main focus.
Drag across the chart to compare two days.Touch the chart with two fingers to compare two days.
Future prices are hidden until you decide.
What would you do?
No virtual money and no score. After you choose, you'll see what happened and a review of the reasoning.