Bleak House: Despair On The 52-Week Low List (GE)(VZ)(GOOG)(C)

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Mar 16, 11:49AM EDT

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Those rummaging through the garbage of 52-week low lists are usually bottom-fishing investors or desperate CEOs. But, the list is so broad that it has become a tableau of the market as a whole, especially the breadth of the market’s decline across almost every industry.

Not a single person in the world is surprised that financials like Bear Stearns (NYSE: BSC), Goldman Sachs (NYSE: GS), Citigroup (NYSE: C), and Cigna (NYSE: CI) hit bottoms last weak. Over in the car business both Ford (NYSE: F) and GM (NYSE: GM) dropped to lows. Perhaps more surprising Toyota (NYSE: TM), the world’s most successful car company, came close. Given its vast resources and cash position, that news said more than the GM or Ford numbers did.

Airlines, as expected, were crushed. AMR (NYSE: AMR) was at the front of the Charge of the Light Brigade. Retail would also expected to be down and many stocks in that sector were at bottom including the previously popular Best Buy (NYSE: BBY).

The newspaper industry, the dying art of people reading information off something other than a computer screen, also had a number of lows, led by Gannett (NYSE:GCI) and McClatchy NYSE: MNI).

If the painful trend ended here, with these sectors, it would at least be in line with what might be expected in troubled industries in a slowing economy. But, it does not.

Communications companies, in both telecom and cable, hit bottoms. Verizon (NYSE: VZ) did the limbo. So did Comcast (NYSE: CMCSA). These firms are known for the breadth of their businesses, astonishing cash flow, and iron-clads balance sheets. By the market’s logic, that data meant little.

Tech also was sucked under. That included some of the first class companies in the sector like Adobe (NYSE: ADBE), Nvidia (NASDAQ: NVDA), and Infosys (NASDAQ: INFY). This is worth some analysis. NVDA is expected to have a 37% increase in revenue this quarter and EPS that will move from $.28 last year to $.39. The company is down almost 50% from its 52-week high. Analysts expect Infosys revenue to be up 32% for the current period. Wall St.’s whirlpool is taking under strong companies as it pulls down the weak.

The same might be said for Big Pharma. Bristol-Myers (NYSE: BMY), Pfizer (NYSE: PFE), and Merck (NYSE: MRK) all posted lows. The markets have been worried about their product pipelines, but that issue has not become more acute recently and these companies are still, for the time being, cash machines. Most have yields above 1.5% and some are much higher.

Deep trouble has also extended to the internet content business which has done well since the tech crash of 2000. Last week TheStreet.com (NASDAQ: TSCM), CNET (NASDAQ: CNET), and IACI (NASDAQ: IACI) dropped to 52-week lows. Given the low fixed costs that these companies sport along with pristine balance sheets, they would seem to be due some break.

Older line media companies, which have said they are not seeing any profound slowing in their businesses we sold off in a near panic dropping CBS (NYSE: CBS) and Time Warner (NYSE: TWX) to the lowest end of their charts.

Alternative energy stocks, not so long ago darlings, pushed to new bottoms. Verasun (NYSE: VSE) and Trina Solar (NYSE: TSL) could not hold on. Even the high cost of oil could not give them buoyancy

The most stunning part of all of this is the capitulation of the blue chips. Boeing (NYSE: BA) hit a 52-week low. The Air Force contract it lost is not worth enough spread over its life to do any real damage. Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) bottomed telling Wall St. that a company with 60% market share and 50% earnings growth was not worth some premium.

And, General Electric (NYSE: GE), the market’s poster boy for American services and industry, hit its low for 52-weeks. It has not backed off its robust projections for EPS improvement. It credit ratings remain the envy of almost every other company in the world. Its business and geographic diversity are supposed to make it the business equivalent of Plato’s ideal of the perfect state.

To look for investor concern about how deep and long the recession will be, the 52-week low list may be the most telling set of numbers available. It is an unusually broad and deep data-base. It is about money, and without emotion.

The list is saying that things are worse off than they seem.

Douglas A. McIntyre

About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.