Delta Air Lines Upgraded by Vetr Inc. to “Buy” (DAL)

The profit announced Wednesday was slightly better than Wall Street expected. Delta’s shares rose in trading before the opening bell.

(NYSE:UAL) reported September 2015 operational results. Delta predicted that it would continue to rack up healthy margins into the winter on the combination of cheaper fuel and solid demand for travel. For the fourth quarter, Delta forecast its operating margin will be between 16 percent and 18 percent. The Growth score analyzes the growth prospects for a company in addition to analyzing company financials.

Bastian continued, “As we look ahead, fuel prices remain volatile and we are not recasting the business for low fuel prices”.

“The aircraft market is going to be ripe for Delta over the course of the next 12 to 36 months”, Anderson said on a conference call after the airline’s third-quarter earnings report.

Delta paid USD$1.80 a gallon for fuel, down sharply from USD$2.90 a year earlier. The current year EPS estimate on the stock is 4.56 and the EPS estimate for next year sits at 5.63.

Delta has already taken advantage of cheap fuel and an in-house maintenance operation to add aging Boeing 717 planes to its fleet.

Delta stock has shown a knack for frustrating bears and bulls with its quick-to-change ability to shift back and forth between downtrends and uptrends within its year-long, mostly lateral base formation. Delta said it will keep passenger capacity flat in Q4, easing fears. (NYSE:DAL) are have issued price targets that range from $69 on the high side to $51 on the low end. The airline responded by cutting passenger-carrying capacity to Asia, its weakest region.

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Delta Air Lines (NYSE:DAL) saw strong trading volume on Tuesday after JPMorgan Chase & Co. raised their price target on the stock from $63.00 to $74.50, Market Beat Ratings reports. During the same quarter in the prior year, the firm posted $1.20 earnings per share. Wolfe Research cut their price objective on shares of Delta Air Lines from $58.00 to $54.00 and set an outperform rating on the stock in a research report on Friday, September 18th. Third-quarter results also compare to the consensus estimates for EPS of $1.70 on revenues of $11.1 billion. At that time, Delta said its annual fuel bill was $12 billion, including a $2.2 billion premium paid to refiners for jet fuel, a payment known as the crack spread.

Delta is on its way to its sixth consecutive year of profitability, but there were several years of multi-billion-dollar losses before that.

And nobody should shed any tears for Delta or other big airlines. Chief financial officer Paul Jacobson said Delta won’t begin paying cash taxes again until 2017. In a report issued on October 5, Deutsche Bank analyst Michael Linenberg maintained a Buy rating on DAL, with a price target of $51, which implies an upside of 6.9% from current levels.