We found an anomaly today in our Chicago Quantum Net Score (long) analysis

We found an anomaly in $AMED Amedisys Inc.

Something is going on with $AMED Amedisys Inc. It does not have a normal stock price distribution with respect to the third movement of stock prices, the kurtosis. Some people have 'junk in the trunk' and this stock has fat tails, both up and down.

This is a NASDAQ listed stock that trades between $90 and $99. It typically trades 400k shares per day. 

It has a small beta of 0.10785 against the S&P 500, down from a 5-year BETA of 0.78 (according to Yahoo Finance). 

It has a market capitalization of $3.2B, a PE ratio of 35, EPS of $2.81 (thank you Yahoo Finance).

This stock has a very low variance of 0.0000074 or 7.4 x 10-6, or about 20% of the variance of the S&P 500 Equity Index ETF.

This stock is very leptokurtic. It's standardized kurtosis measure is 36.451. It is highly leptokurtic (normal distribution for kurtosis is a 3.0, and the next highest kurtosis stock has a score of 6.83.

This stock is the 184th stock in our long Chicago Quantum Net Score CQNS market analysis, out of 1,338 stocks and ETFs. It scores well because the variance is lower than would be predicted by the BETA score, and that is better than 85% of all stocks analyzed on September 16, 2024.

It has a relatively good match of low BETA and even lower variance.

No dividend paid in the past year.

Leptokurtic means there have been surprises, or high-standard deviation moves in the stock. 
In late October of 2023, we saw a "V" shaped move, up and down, that eventually led to a rally up. Rally is a funny term, as it was up maybe 4%, but for this stock that is a very large move.

In middle to late April, 2024, the stock fell sharply for a few days, then recovered (again, another 3% move in total up and down), then crashed 4% at the end of May, then soared higher by 5% at the end of June.

There were analyst ratings events close to a few of the events, and earnings for one. 

I wonder if these short, explosive moves are related to options? If so, why end of month moves?

So, this is a leptokurtic stock. It typically moves gradually with very small moves and a very small BETA and stock price variance. However, we see , we see a few dramatic moves.

There is a pending acquisition of Amedisys by United Healthcare Group (UHG) Optum unit for $101 / share, but like all mergers these deals are not 'sure things' and this one is undergoing anti-competition review by at least the Department of Justice, Oregon regulators (OHA). Source

Our next step is to see how we can profit from this anomaly. Maybe you can too.

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Thank you,
Chicago Quantum
US Advanced Computing Infrastructure, Inc.
Jeffrey Cohen, President and Investment Advisor Principal