Investors braced for a bumpy ride ahead of Interval Leisure Group's (Nasdaq: IILG) earnings announcement, as the company has wavered between beating and falling short of analyst predictions during the past fiscal year. The company will unveil its latest earnings on Thursday, March 8. Interval Leisure Group is a global provider of membership and leisure services to the vacation industry.

What analysts say:

  • Buy, sell, or hold?: Analysts are very bullish on this stock, unanimously backing it as a buy. Analysts like Interval Leisure Group better than competitor Viad overall. Zero out of one analysts rate Viad a buy compared to two out of two for Interval Leisure Group. Analysts' rating of Interval Leisure Group has stayed constant from three months prior.
  • Revenue forecasts: On average, analysts predict $97.4 million in revenue this quarter. That would represent a rise of 4.2% from the year-ago quarter.
  • Wall Street earnings expectations: The average analyst estimate is earnings of $0.10 per share. Estimates range from $0.09 to $0.12.

What our community says:
CAPS All-Stars are split on Interval Leisure Group, with 54.5% rating it an outperform and 45.5% giving it an underperform rating. Fools are of two minds on the stock, as 47.6% of the community is awarding it an outperform rating and 52.4% an underperform rating. Interval Leisure Group's bearish CAPS rating of one out of five stars falls short of the Fool community sentiment.

Management:
Interval Leisure Group's profit has risen year over year by an average of 3.2% over the past five quarters. Revenue has now gone up for three straight quarters.

Now let's look at how efficient management is at running the business. Traditionally, margins represent the efficiency with which companies capture portions of sales dollars. Interval Leisure Group's gross margins, which reflect the total sales revenue retained after costs, have been slipping year over year for the last three quarters. Here are Interval Leisure Group's reported margins for the last four quarters:

Quarter

Q3

Q2

Q1

Q4

Gross Margin

67.5%

66.5%

67.9%

66.4%

Operating Margin

23.7%

20.7%

26.7%

19.3%

Net Margin

10.7%

7.1%

11.3%

6.8%

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Earnings estimates provided by Zacks.