Day Runner Stock Dips $2.50 a Share After Analyst Revises Outlook

FULLERTON —  Day Runner Inc.’s common stock plunged $2.50 a share to close at $12.25 in relatively heavy trading Tuesday in the wake of a stock analyst’s revised earnings report.

Marcia L. Aaron, an analyst with Montgomery Securities in San Francisco, changed her fourth-quarter earnings estimate to a range of 38 cents to 42 cents a share; earlier, she had predicted that Day Runner would earn a flat 42 cents a share.

Judy Tucker, a Day Runner spokeswoman, said she could not comment on Aaron’s new report. “We talk to analysts and provide them information, and then they go off and do what they want with it,” she said.

As for the plunge in stock value, she said: “If I could figure out the stock market, I wouldn’t have to work.”

Even at Aaron’s low estimate of 38 cents a share, Day Runner would post a profit of about $2.3 million for the fourth quarter--43% more than the company’s earnings of $1.6 million reported for the same period a year earlier.

Aaron could not be reached for comment.

Day Runner, which designs and sells calendar, address and project-planning books, went public early this year at $15 a share. The stock had traded as high as $21.75 in March before dropping to a low of $10.25 a share in June.

For the first nine months of the year, Day Runner’s profit rose 50% to $2.56 million, or 45 cents a share, from $1.7 million, or 38 cents a share, a year earlier.

The number of shares outstanding has risen to 5.2 million from 2.8 million at the time of the initial public stock sale in March. Estimates of earnings per share, however, are based on an estimated total of 6 million shares outstanding at the end of the fourth quarter, Tucker said.