Yahoo Finance What Can We Expect for National Bankshares Inc (NASDAQ:NKSH) Moving Forward?
National Bankshares Inc (NASDAQ:NKSH), a US$315.5m small-cap, operates in the banking industry, which now face the choice of either being disintermediated or proactively disrupting their own business models to thrive in the future. Financial services analysts are forecasting for the entire industry, an extremely robust growth of 40.0% in the upcoming year , and a whopping growth of 56.7% over the next couple of years. However this rate still came in below the growth rate of the US stock market as a whole. Today, I’ll take you through the sector growth expectations, as well as evaluate whether National Bankshares is lagging or leading in the industry.
View our latest analysis for National Bankshares
What’s the catalyst for National Bankshares’s sector growth?
The threat of disintermediation in the payments industry is both real and imminent, taking profits away from traditional incumbent financial institutions. Over the past year, the industry saw growth in the teens, though still underperforming the wider US stock market. National Bankshares lags the pack with its negative growth rate of -2.1% over the past year, which indicates the company has been growing at a slower pace than its banking peers. Although National Bankshares is poised to deliver a 29.4% growth next year, moving it from negative to positive territory, it still lags its industry average rate of growth of 40.0%.
Is National Bankshares and the sector relatively cheap?
The banking industry is trading at a PE ratio of 18.2x, relatively similar to the rest of the US stock market PE of 20.18x. This means the industry, on average, is fairly valued compared to the wider market – minimal expected gains and losses from mispricing here. However, the industry returned a lower 8.1% compared to the market’s 10.7%, potentially indicative of past headwinds. On the stock-level, National Bankshares is trading at a PE ratio of 22.28x, which is relatively in-line with the average banking stock. In terms of returns, National Bankshares generated 7.6% in the past year, in-line with its industry average.
Next Steps:
If National Bankshares has been on your watchlist for a while, now may not be the best time to enter into the stock. The company is a banking industry laggard in terms of its future growth outlook, and is trading relatively in-line with its peers. If growth and mispricing are important aspects for your investment thesis, there may be better investments in the financial sector. However, before you make a decision on the stock, I suggest you look at National Bankshares’s fundamentals in order to build a holistic investment thesis.
Financial Health: Does it have a healthy balance sheet? Take a look at our free balance sheet analysis with six simple checks on key factors like leverage and risk.
Historical Track Record: What has NKSH’s performance been like over the past? Go into more detail in the past track record analysis and take a look at the free visual representations of our analysis for more clarity.
Other High-Growth Alternatives : Are there other high-growth stocks you could be holding instead of National Bankshares? Explore our interactive list of stocks with large growth potential to get an idea of what else is out there you may be missing!
To help readers see past the short term volatility of the financial market, we aim to bring you a long-term focused research analysis purely driven by fundamental data. Note that our analysis does not factor in the latest price-sensitive company announcements.
The author is an independent contributor and at the time of publication had no position in the stocks mentioned. For errors that warrant correction please contact the editor at editorial-team@simplywallst.com.
