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USA Truck (USAK) Gains But Lags Market: What You Should Know

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USA Truck closed at $15.07 in the latest trading session, marking a +0.4% move from the prior day. The stock lagged the S&P 500's daily gain of 0.51%.

Coming into today, shares of the truckload carrier had lost 1.19% in the past month. In that same time, the Transportation sector lost 2.55%, while the S&P 500 gained 1.75%.

Wall Street will be looking for positivity from USAK as it approaches its next earnings report date. In that report, analysts expect USAK to post earnings of $0.50 per share. This would mark year-over-year growth of 933.33%.

Investors might also notice recent changes to analyst estimates for USAK. These revisions help to show the ever-changing nature of near-term business trends. With this in mind, we can consider positive estimate revisions a sign of optimism about the company's business outlook.

Research indicates that these estimate revisions are directly correlated with near-term share price momentum. To benefit from this, we have developed the Zacks Rank, a proprietary model which takes these estimate changes into account and provides an actionable rating system.

The Zacks Rank system ranges from #1 (Strong Buy) to #5 (Strong Sell). It has a remarkable, outside-audited track record of success, with #1 stocks delivering an average annual return of +25% since 1988. Within the past 30 days, our consensus EPS projection has moved 12.82% higher. USAK is currently a Zacks Rank #2 (Buy).

Digging into valuation, USAK currently has a Forward P/E ratio of 6.82. This represents a discount compared to its industry's average Forward P/E of 16.77.

The Transportation - Truck industry is part of the Transportation sector. This industry currently has a Zacks Industry Rank of 26, which puts it in the top 11% of all 250+ industries.

The Zacks Industry Rank includes is listed in order from best to worst in terms of the average Zacks Rank of the individual companies within each of these sectors. Our research shows that the top 50% rated industries outperform the bottom half by a factor of 2 to 1.

Be sure to follow all of these stock-moving metrics, and many more, on Zacks.com.

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