What’s The Deal With These Falling Stocks?

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Although crude futures have hit a monthly high and investors are calm, with the VIX fear index below 14, shares of several major companies such as Priceline Group Inc (NASDAQ:PCLN), Symantec Corporation (NASDAQ:SYMC), Infinera Corp. (NASDAQ:INFN), FirstEnergy Corp. (NYSE:FE), and Potash Corporation of Saskatchewan (USA) (NYSE:POT) are in the red today. In this article, we’ll analyze why each stock is taking a beating and examine how the smart money is positioned in each of the five stocks.

We believe that imitating hedge funds and other large institutional investors can be helpful in identifying stocks capable of outperforming the broader market. Through extensive research that covered portfolios of several hundred large investors between 1999 and 2012, we determined that following the small-cap stocks that large money managers are collectively bullish on, can generate monthly returns nearly 1.0 percentage point above the market (see the details here).

Priceline Down on CEO Churn

Priceline Group Inc (NASDAQ:PCLN) is 0.75% lower after the online travel booking site’s CEO, Darren Huston, resigned effective immediately. Huston resigned following an investigation by independent members of the Board concerning Huston’s personal relationship with an employee of Priceline. The independent members of the board determined that Huston’s relationship with that employee was not within the company’s code of conduct. Former CEO and current chairman Jeffery Boyd will act as the Interim CEO until Priceline’s board finds a suitable successor. Stephen Mandel‘s Lone Pine Capital owned 834,421 shares of Priceline Group Inc (NASDAQ:PCLN) at the end of December.

Follow Booking Holdings Inc. (NASDAQ:BKNG)

Symantec Guides Lower

Symantec Corporation (NASDAQ:SYMC) reported some bad news on Thursday and its stock is down by 4.5% because of it. The first bad news item concerns CEO Michael Brown, who will step down once a successor has been found. CEO uncertainty is never good, as evidence by the above news article as well. The second bad news item was the company’s issuance of lower guidance for the fourth quarter of fiscal year 2016. Symantec now expects EPS of $0.22 on sales of $873 million, down from previous guidance of $0.24-to-$0.27 in EPS on revenue of $885 million-to-$915 million. Symantec Corporation (NASDAQ:SYMC) will report its fiscal fourth quarter earnings on May 12. 29 top funds that Insider Monkey tracks out of a total of 786 actively reporting funds held shares of Symantec at the end of 2015.

Follow Gen Digital Inc. (NASDAQ:GEN)

On the next page we examine why Infinera Corp, FirstEnergy Corp, and Potash Corporation of Saskatchewan (USA) are among the stocks sliding today.

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