What Happened?
Shares of industrial supplier Fastenal (NASDAQ: FAST) fell 4.6% in the morning session after the company released its sales information for August 2025.
The industrial supplies distributor reported that net sales for the month increased by 6.7% year-over-year to $696.7 million. However, this growth occurred despite having one less business day in August 2025 compared to August 2024. When accounting for this difference, the company's daily sales actually grew by a more robust 11.8%. The stock's decline suggests that investors may have been disappointed by the headline net sales figure, potentially viewing it as a sign of slowing growth despite the stronger underlying performance indicated by the daily sales metric.
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What Is The Market Telling Us
Fastenal’s shares are not very volatile and have only had 4 moves greater than 5% over the last year. In that context, today’s move indicates the market considers this news meaningful, although it might not be something that would fundamentally change its perception of the business.
The biggest move we wrote about over the last year was 5 months ago when the stock gained 7% on the news that the company reported strong first quarter 2025 results which blew past analysts' sales volume expectations. Sales, EBITDA, and EPS were also in line with expectations, which showed the company was executing as expected. Sales growth continued to improve despite broader business activity remaining soft, helped by a bigger base of customers spending more each month. Overall, we think this was a decent quarter.
Fastenal is up 33.6% since the beginning of the year, and at $47.49 per share, it is trading close to its 52-week high of $50.39 from August 2025. Investors who bought $1,000 worth of Fastenal’s shares 5 years ago would now be looking at an investment worth $2,173.
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