PROspecting for Stock Gold: Wal-Mart Stores

Building a successful stock portfolio starts with finding great businesses. And finding great businesses requires digging through financial statements, news, and other information to find companies with leading growth rates, strong margins, and healthy financials.  

In our PROspecting Stocks screen, we evaluate proprietary community intelligence from the 135,000-plus investors participating in Motley Fool CAPS as well as four key, handpicked fundamental criteria.

Our goal is to accelerate your research, and find the stocks that are worth a closer look. So get out your shovel and pickax as we start digging for gold!

Wal-Mart vs. Industry Peers

	Wal-Mart Stores	(NYSE: WMT)	Target	(NYSE: TGT)	Kohl's	(NYSE: KSS)	J.C. Penney	(NYSE: JCP)
CAPS Community Rating We prefer 4-star or 5-star stocks.	***		***		**		**
CAPS 1000 We like stocks rated "outperform" by 80% of top CAPS members.	91.5% Outperform	Yes	85.9% Outperform	Yes	35.7% Outperform		52.9% Outperform
Five-Year Revenue Growth We like to see five-year revenue growth of at least 10%.	7.9%		6.9%		8.3%		(1.3%)
Gross Margin (TTM) We like to see gross margins of 35% or higher.	25.7%		31.4%		37.4%	Yes	36.3%	Yes
Total Debt-to-Equity A total debt-to-equity ratio of 0.50 or less gets a check.	0.7		1.3		0.3	Yes	0.8
Return on Equity We look for a minimum of 14% return on equity.	21.3%	Yes	15.1%	Yes	12.5%		8.6%