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The following are today's upgrades for Validea's Book/Market Investor model based on the published strategy of Joseph Piotroski. This value-quant strategy screens for high book-to-market stocks, and then separates out financially sound firms by looking at a host of improving financial criteria.

HOME BANCORP, INC. (HBCP) is a small-cap value stock in the Money Center Banks industry. The rating according to our strategy based on Joseph Piotroski changed from 0% to 80% based on the firm’s underlying fundamentals and the stock’s valuation. A score of 80% or above typically indicates that the strategy has some interest in the stock and a score above 90% typically indicates strong interest.

Company Description: Home Bancorp, Inc. is a bank holding company for Home Bank, N.A. (the Bank), a nationally chartered bank. The Bank conducts business through approximately 43 banking offices in the Acadiana, Baton Rouge, Greater New Orleans and Northshore (of Lake Pontchartrain) regions of south Louisiana, the Natchez region of west Mississippi and Houston region of Texas. The Bank is primarily engaged in attracting deposits from the public and using those funds to invest in loans and securities. Its principal sources of funds are customer deposits, repayments of loans, repayments of investments and funds borrowed from outside sources such as the Federal Home Loan Bank (FHLB) of Dallas. These funds are primarily used for the origination of loans, including one-to four-family first mortgage loans, home equity loans and lines, commercial real estate loans, construction and land loans, multi-family residential loans, commercial and industrial loans, and consumer loans.

The following table summarizes whether the stock meets each of this strategy's tests. Not all criteria in the below table receive equal weighting or are independent, but the table provides a brief overview of the strong and weak points of the security in the context of the strategy's criteria.

Detailed Analysis of HOME BANCORP, INC.

About Joseph Piotroski: Piotroski isn't your typical Wall Street big shot. In fact, he's not even a professional investor. He's a good old numbers-crunching accountant and college professor. But in 2000, shortly after he started teaching at the University of Chicago's Graduate School of Business, Piotroski published a groundbreaking paper in the Journal of Accounting Research entitled "Value Investing: The Use of Historical Financial Statement Information to Separate Winners from Losers". In it, Piotroski laid out an accounting-based stock-selection/shorting method that produced a 23 percent average annual back-tested return from 1976 through 1996 -- more than double the S&P 500's gain during that time. Piotroski's findings were reported in major financial publiations like SmartMoney. Today, he teaches accounting at Stanford University's Graduate School of Business.

About Validea: Validea is aninvestment researchservice that follows the published strategies of investment legends. Validea offers both stock analysis and model portfolios based on gurus who have outperformed the market over the long-term, including Warren Buffett, Benjamin Graham, Peter Lynch and Martin Zweig. For more information about Validea, click here

The views and opinions expressed herein are the views and opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of Nasdaq, Inc.