As a follow-up to our blog post from earlier today covering the reasons to avoid Eastman Chemical Company (NYSE:EMN), we took another perspective into EMN’s profitability and stock performance relative to its peers. In the last 10 years, the company’s Economic Margins (EMs) have lagged its competitors, especially in the last 2 years as shown in the chart below. If you pay close attention to the recent EM levels of EMN and DOW (both lagging DD and FMC) that have both been struggling, the fact that EM levels are so closely correlated with market performance it is no surprise that in the bottom chart that EMN and DOW both have greatly underperformed DD and FMC year-to-date.