Investing

6 Big Companies That Severely Stung Shareholders This Past Week

This past week looked decent and kept the bulls interested, but the reality is that the market lacked much of the strength of the prior week. Two weeks in a row of a 1,000 point rally probably isn’t fair to ask of any market. All of this is as the market is trying to decipher what is a fair stock market multiple and when the Federal Reserve will hike rates, which seems to be keeping many bulls and bears on edge.

While there were many winners, last week brought a lot of truly bad news or bad reactions for some of the large cap stocks in the market. Despite our headline implying that companies caused major losses for their shareholders, the reality is that some of the forces are not formally company-driven events.

Here are six mid-cap and large-cap stocks that just put a serious sting on the bullish scenario for each of their stocks.

Alcoa

Alcoa Inc. (NYSE: AA) may have sealed its fate with its own efforts, but oddly enough the negative news was from the prior week. A break-up of the company preempted a very negative earnings report. Despite the stock market (Dow) rising 1,000 points a week before this week, this week was very choppy. It wasn’t choppy for Alcoa — the week was just a crummy week.

Goldman Sachs warned of further price weakness in alumina this week. Alcoa was an $11.00 stock after the break-up news but before earnings, and it closed out the prior week at $10.26. Shares were down each day this past week for six straight days of lower prices, and Alcoa’s stock price was just over $9.50 on Friday’s close.

We warned readers before and would like the company to pay attention now: a breakup here just comes with too much risk, and it ignores the value thesis that conglomerates have in harder times.

ALSO READ: Big Biotech Is Cheap With Strong Cash Flows: 3 to Buy Before Earnings

Eli Lilly

It was looking like Eli Lilly and Co. (NYSE: LLY) was ready to be the next home run for Big Pharma investors due to diabetes and Alzheimer’s drug hopes. Then on Monday came very unexpected news that its evacetrapib for high-risk atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease and its ACCELERATE study needed to be terminated due to insufficient efficacy.

This news knocked Eli Lilly’s share price down from $86.14 the prior week to under $80.00 for the first four days of the week. Shares closed trading at $81.51 on Friday, but that is still down almost 6% from the prior week. A loss of 10% would be close to $9 billion in the prior market cap.

GoPro

GoPro Inc. (NASDAQ: GPRO) hit new all-time lows when shares dipped under $27.00 last week. While GoPro is now valued at less than $4 billion, the reality is that this stock has battered and was down by more than two-thirds from its peak. Any shareholders who decided to run for the hills in 2014 when the Woodman share sale news (and the controversy that followed) broke have been proven right here.

A fresh analyst downgrade Piper Jaffray this past week just added insult to injury. The prior week’s top negative call was from Oppenheimer, calling for even more caution ahead, and this analyst was right by being negative back up in the $80s share price range. Maybe the media channel will help, but for now this is effectively viewed as one-product to two-product company with high valuations.

ALSO READ: 4 Merrill Lynch Buy-Rated Technology Stocks That Pay Big Dividends
Netflix

Netflix Inc. (NASDAQ: NFLX) probably wishes that Carl Icahn would have come out talking it up as a no-brainer or something this week. The company’s earnings report came with a big disappointment in the overall subscriber growth, which was the real culprit.

Analysts were less than optimistic on the news in general, and Netflix shares traded down again on Friday and ended the week at $98.99. This was a $113.45 stock before earnings, and it was briefly above $115.00 early in the week. For rounding, let’s just call that a 15% loss for a tally of almost 45 billion in market cap lost.

VMware

This one may be getting hosed in the Dell acquisition of EMC Corp. (NYSE: EMC). By creating a tracking stock, and with the possibility of the combined Dell/EMC unloading more shares of VMware Inc. (NYSE: VMW), the end outcome is a diluted and larger share float of VMware.

The leader of virtualization and a dominant cloud player has won from a share scarcity in recent years. Now that share scarcity could (while not yet definite) disappear. Our view at the time was that VMware was the only solid growth engine at EMC, and now it feels like it is being put in the steerage section of the ship.

VMware shares were at $82.00 in the middle of the prior week, before the news of a VMware tracking stock might be part of a Dell-EMC merger. They closed out the Friday before the merger confirmation at $78.65, and they went as low as about $67.50, before closing $69.62 on Friday. That is still a loss of more than 17% from peak to trough before it recovered, and VMware is worth just over $29 billion.

Wal-Mart

Wal-Mart Stores Inc. (NYSE: WMT) went from a value stock to a value trap this past week. The company said at its investor day that it now expects a sharp drop in earnings per share for 2016. Some 75% of that blame is put on high wages, despite a much needed capital spending increase and a strong dollar impact. Wal-Mart shares dropped 10% on the news and had their worst one-day reaction we have seen in many years.

To make this really stand out: Wal-Mart’s $20 billion share buyback announced just doesn’t matter at this point, because that is almost exactly how much market cap the company lost on its announcement. Wal-Mart’s news was so bad that it hurt just about anything and everything tied to retail where wages may be a serious issue ahead. It has been a long time since Wal-Mart shares were under $60.00, not since May of 2012.

ALSO READ: 5 Dividend-Paying Blue Chip Stocks Trading Under 15 Times Forward Earnings

These were far from the only stocks that took hits this week. Still, these were the major stock stories with very negative implications around them for shareholders. Some weakness may be temporary. Some weakness may last much longer.

A group of charts below has been provided using StockCharts.com for a Candle Glance as of Friday afternoon shortly before the closing bell. The montage includes the Dow, S&P 500, Nasdaq, Alcoa, Eli Lilly, GoPro, Netflix, VMware and Wal-Mart, and it is a two-month chart performance with 20-day and 50-day moving averages included.


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