John Wiley & Sons (WLY): A Timely, Under-the-Radar Stock Pick

Every once in a while, you find a gem somewhere you’d almost never think to look. I think I stumbled on one just now.

What’s the first thing that comes to mind when I say publishing? I’ll wager it’s nothing too bombastic. Publishing isn’t sexy, it doesn’t attract headlines, and it just seems plain boring. No offense to the people in publishing.

But it’s our 7th highest-rated industry at the moment. Out of 145. That’s peculiar, at least.

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What’s even more peculiar is that most of the stocks in the industry don’t rank highly in terms of fundamentals. Our in-house rating system, Zen Ratings, looks at stocks through the lens of 115 metrics. Only the top 5% are given a Zen Rating of A — those stocks have provided an average annual return of 32.52% since the early 2000s. And look …

Most of the stocks in publishing have C grades. That corresponds to an average annual return of just 7.53% per year.

There is one exception, however. Literally one. 

Here's the ticker…

John Wiley & Sons (NYSE: WLY), a $1.87 billion market cap ticker that has rallied by 26.26% in the past 30 days. They provide scientific journals, digital books, courseware, and learning platforms to researchers, universities, businesses, and government institutions, while also offering online program management and talent placement services for higher education and corporate clients.

The fundamentals are a showstopper. Top 2% out of the 4,600 stocks that we track. But to understand exactly what’s so great about it, we have to look at its Component Grade ratings.

That mass of B ratings reflects multifaceted fundamental strength. For Financials, it ranks in the top 7%. When it comes to Sentiment, it’s in the 92nd percentile — meaning equivalent to or better than 92% of stocks, or, in other words, in the top 8%. It also ranks in the 92nd percentile for Artificial Intelligence — which tells you that our in-house neural network, trained on more than two decades of market data, has singled it out as a likely outperformer.

The return on equity is a fair margin above the industry average. And you can see that earnings per share are forecast to grow at a pretty impressive rate. All of this puts it in the top 19% for Growth — and yeah, there might be some room for improvement, but it’s still quite a high ranking.

There’s another neat thing about WLY — the dividend. It’s at a forward yield of 4.58%, above the industry average, and it has been remarkably stable over the past 10 years.

To boot, the payout ratio isn’t excessive — so none of those distributions are taxing on the health of the business or taking away from growth.

They’ve been executing at a high level since Q2 2025. Six quarters of beating EPS estimates on the books. And these weren’t slim earnings beats either. Look at how it went down (and mind that they use a non-calendar fiscal year, which starts in May):

Q2 2025 — $0.88 estimated, $0.97 delivered

Q3 2025 — $0.65 estimated, $0.84 delivered

Q4 2025 — $1.27 estimated, $1.37 delivered

Q1 2026 — $0.32 estimated, $0.49 delivered

Q2 2026 — $0.78 estimated, $1.10 delivered

Q3 2026 — $0.86 estimated, $0.97 delivered

That last one, Q3 2026 — that was on March 5th. On the day before, it closed at $30.45. As I’m writing this, it’s at $36.71, so that’s a gain of more than 20%.

So, we were too late, right? Not so fast. I’ve been saving the best for last, and it’s the valuation — particularly relative to growth prospects.

Three things to note here. Price-to-earnings ratio at 12.53x, while the publishing industry average is 43x, and the wider market average is 32x. Price to earnings growth (PEG) ratio at 0.39x, indicating it is severely undervalued. And it’s even below a 1x on price to sales, so you’re paying 98 cents for a dollar of revenue.

All of that, plus it’s still about 24% away from its 52-week high. And it’s managed to run almost completely under the radar. I wouldn’t be surprised if the rally holds, and frankly, I wouldn’t be surprised if that 52-week high is surpassed in the medium-term. I doubt that we’ll see a better price for this one any time soon — so if I’ve managed to pique your curiosity, please give it a closer look for yourself.

—> Click here to research WLY

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