El Pollo Loco Stock

Anyone have any strong opinions for or against El Pollo Loco (LOCO)?

While the stock gained a lot of attention by opening at $15 and finishing at $24 in its first trading day Friday, the company has many red flags e.g. losses, debt, slow growth. I'm interested to hear what WSO thinks.

14 Comments
 

Your pursuits are far better suited by making a shopping list of dividend players and conducting a little due diligence on different P/E ratios and the compounding effect of re-investing dividends. Maybe look at writing yourself into said positions via PUTs when the time comes. Then just sit on your hands and wait. It isn't sexy but it'll outperform anything else you are going to come up with.

 

HAHAHA. You beat me to it.

CNBC sucks "This financial crisis is worse than a divorce. I've lost all my money, but the wife is still here." - Client after getting blown up
 

Well as an investor in El Pollo Loco I have more than doubled my money. Now I agree that this is a very risky stock and the sharp uptrend in the stock is in my opinion mostly cause from hype and excitement that this COULD be the next Chipotle. Now I took it upon myself to pop my El Pollo Loco cherry last week and must say I found the food to be quite good, they grill the chicken in front of you and all in all it just doesn't give you that greasy feeling you'd get from like a Mcdonald or Burger King. Compared to Chipotle in it's IPO days, Chipotle was turning more revenue and profit than LOCO but I would not count them out since they just raised almost 150 mil from their IPO and are using most of it to pay off their huge debt sums, so now they can focus their money on things such as expansion which could be huge for them.

 

With the share performance and level of debt, this company is just screaming for a secondary offering in the near future. They should be pissed at the bookrunners for setting such a low IPO price, left a lot of money on the table.

CNBC sucks "This financial crisis is worse than a divorce. I've lost all my money, but the wife is still here." - Client after getting blown up
 

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