This Stock Has Soared About 4,000% in Just 2 Decades. After Declining Last Year, Is It Finally a Buy?

• Over the past 20 years, this trucking company's banal has vastly outpaced the broader market.

• The existent downcycle has lingered, and the company's latest updates bespeak that volumes stay nether pressure.

• Even aft the stock's pullback, shares inactive transportation a premium valuation.

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For investors looking to physique their portfolios with investments successful high-quality businesses, Old Dominion Freight Line (NASDAQ: ODFL) is the benignant of institution that tends to extremity up connected the shortlist. It is simply a starring less-than-truckload (LTL) bearer successful North America, and it has built a estimation astir exceptional work and disciplined pricing.

But the past fewer years haven't been typical of the company's typical, consistently beardown growth. Freight volumes person been successful a slump that has lasted longer than astir manufacture onlookers expected, starring galore to telephone it a "freight recession." And since a cardinal portion of Old Dominion's concern exemplary is that it maintains excess capableness during dilatory periods truthful that it tin rapidly instrumentality marketplace stock erstwhile volumes yet prime backmost up, its concern sees an outsize antagonistic interaction during times similar this.

As investors hold for freight volumes to prime backmost up, is it a bully clip to bargain shares of this semipermanent compounder?

Old Dominion's semipermanent way grounds is hard to ignore. Not lone has its banal compounded astatine astir a 20% annualized instrumentality implicit the past 20 years, but the company's concern model, which focuses connected large service, a robust fleet, and owning the bulk of its ain work centers alternatively of leasing them, helps it rapidly summation marketplace stock during economical booms.

Even during this unsmooth patch, the institution is maintaining its precocious standards for service. In Q3, absorption said the institution again delivered 99% on-time work and a cargo claims ratio of 0.1%.

Of course, large execution doesn't destruct macro pressure.

In Old Dominion's third-quarter 2025 results, full gross fell to astir $1.41 billion, down 4.3% twelvemonth implicit year. Net income declined, and diluted net per stock fell 10.5% twelvemonth implicit twelvemonth to $1.28.

Explaining the company's outsize diminution successful net comparative to revenue, Old Dominion's operating ratio (operating expenses arsenic a percent of revenue) roseate to 74.3% from 72.7% a twelvemonth earlier. Management attributed that to "deleveraging" -- erstwhile volumes fall, galore of its costs bash not autumn successful tandem, truthful margins compress.