While many home improvement items, if not all, can certainly be purchased on line, some costly supplies needed for remodeling projects (think lumber, sheet rock, and granite, for example) are more likely to be purchased at a brick-and-mortar store than to be purchased online, observes John Reese, editor of Validea.

This could give home improvement retailers a slight edge against e-commerce competition. The holiday shopping season has also seen increased foot traffic to retailers, a surprising development given the presence of online retailers and further good news for DIY retailers.

RetailDive.com reported recently that lines at major department stores were long and parking lots were near full capacity last weekend, adding, "Even lines for pictures with Santa Claus have been longer this year."

Using stock screening models I created based on the strategies of successful investors such as Warren Buffett, Peter Lynch, James O'Shaughnessy and others, I have identified the following high-scoring home improvement-related stock that looks good as we head into 2018:

Stanley Black & Decker, Inc. (SWK) is a global provider of hand tools, power tools and related accessories as well as commercial security and monitoring systems and various industrial products and services.

The company gets a thumb's up from our Peter Lynch-based stock screening model due to its three-year average EPS growth rate of 20.7% (this model considers sustainable EPS growth to fall within the range of between 20% and 50%). The company's P/E ratio of 21.34 relative to the its sales of $12.2 billion also passes this screen.

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