Speaking with Analyst James Lucas about Industrial Equipment recently, he gave us his five companies to look at in this space. The industrial equipment space may be doing poorly this year, but be sure to look to these companies to see just when it’ll turn around:

Mr. Lucas: There are a number of different data points to track. Companies like Grainger (GWW) and Fastenal (FAST) in the distribution space provide their sales data and watching those month-to-month trends gives an indication of what’s going on because they tend to be MRO-related products, so it’s more of the day-to-day handling within a business. Kennametal (KMT) in the machine tools space, Illinois Tool Works (ITW), which tends to be little bit more consumer and commercial related, and Emerson (EMR), which gives you some network power, technology, and is very heavy on the process oil and gas side, also give their monthly numbers. When you take those five, it gives you a pretty good cross-section of the overall economy to get an idea of what’s going on out there.

For the full Industrial Equipment report, including the full interview with Mr. Lucas, as well as interviews with top CEOs in this space, click here.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 7th, 2009 at 5:19 pm and is filed under Industrial & Services Stocks. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.