General Electric Co. (NYSE: GE) did not get nor did it reveal any particularly bad news last week, but the stock price took a hit anyway, and the stock retained its ranking as the worst performer among the Dow Jones Industrial Average equities, a place it held for more than half of 2017.
GE’s shares lost about 3% last week and shares are down more than 10% since the beginning of the year. The second-worst Dow stock so far this year is Procter & Gamble Co. (NYSE: PG), down 8.3%, followed by Chevron Corp. (NYSE: CVX) which is down about 5.3%. Apple Inc. (NASDAQ: AAPL) is down about 5.2%, and American Express Co. (NYSE: AXP) is down about 2.7%.
The Dow did not post an all-time high last week. In fact, the index posted a loss on every day last week except Thursday, when it managed a gain of about 0.4%. The Dow dropped 4% last week and nearly 666 points on Friday alone.
The GE share price dropped Tuesday following a report that Deutsche Bank analysts believe that the stock will be ousted from the Dow. GE is an original component of the index and has been included for more than 120 years. Analyst John Inch wrote:
We believe the chances that GE could be removed from the Dow are increasing as GE continues to face substantial challenges including earnings and cash pressure, tough global power generation markets, aggressive downsizing, shrinking its portfolio, management shake-up and SEC investigations. Apart from GE’s other challenges, as the company’s absolute share price has continued to drop, GE increasingly falls into the category of outlier and consequently a likely candidate for removal.
The stock is the most heavily traded among all Dow 30 stocks, with an average daily volume of nearly 88 million shares. Intel, the second-most heavily traded stock, trades around 33 million shares a day.
And as for being an “outlier,” GE’s share price at Friday’s close was less than half that of Pfizer, which closed at $36.61.
GE shares sank to a new 52-week low of $15.60 on Friday and closed at $15.64. The 52-week high is $30.59. The 12-month consensus price target is $20.28, down $0.42 week over week, with the low target at $15 and the high target at $36.
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