Ten big names ended Thursday’s trading on a lackluster performance, mirroring two of Wall Street’s major indices, as investors digested more corporate earnings, among others.
Meanwhile, only the Dow Jones finished in the green during the session, inching up 0.03 percent. The Nasdaq and the S&P 500 both fell by 1.18 percent and 0.54 percent, respectively.
In this article, we name the 10 worst-performers on Thursday and detail the reasons behind their drop.
To come up with the list, we focused exclusively on the stocks with a $2 billion market capitalization and 5 million shares in trading volume.
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10. Applied Optoelectronics Inc. (NASDAQ:AAOI)
Applied Optoelectronics saw its share prices drop by 7.62 percent on Thursday to close at $53.69 apiece, as investors priced in a strong earnings performance last year, while taking profits after a five-day gain.
In an updated report, Applied Optoelectronics Inc. (NASDAQ:AAOI) said that it narrowed its net loss last year by 80 percent to $38.2 million from $186.7 million in 2024, as total revenues soared by 83 percent to $455.7 million from $249 million.
In the fourth quarter alone, net loss shrank by 98 percent to just $2.02 million from $119.7 million in the same period a year earlier. Total revenues also increased by 33.9 percent to $134.27 million from $100.27 million.
“We are pleased to deliver record fourth quarter results that were in line with or better than our expectations, and which capped off the strongest year in our company’s history,” Applied Optoelectronics Inc. (NASDAQ:AAOI) President and CEO Thompson Lin said.
“Our results were driven by broad-based demand in both our CATV and datacenter businesses. We have considerable momentum entering 2026, and we believe we are well-positioned to accelerate our growth this year,” he added.
For the first quarter of the year, Applied Optoelectronics Inc. (NASDAQ:AAOI) expects revenues to grow by 50 to 66 percent to a range of $150 million to $165 million.
9. Fermi Inc. (NASDAQ:FRMI)
Fermi snapped a two-day run on Thursday, shedding 7.97 percent to finish at $10.85 apiece, as investors resorted to profit-taking following a whopping 31-percent jump in just the past two trading days of the week.
The recent surge was bolstered by an analyst’s maintained “buy” recommendation for the stock, despite lowering its price target to $35 from $37 previously.
The issuance also overshadowed an ongoing class action lawsuit against Fermi Inc. (NASDAQ:FRMI) by shareholder law firms in relation to alleged misinformation about company developments, including misinformation about tenant demand for the 11-GW Project Matador project campus; that the project would only rely on a single tenant’s funding commitment to finance the construction; and significant risks that the tenant would terminate the funding commitment, among others.
Fermi Inc. (NASDAQ:FRMI) is underway with the Front-End Engineering Design activities for the project, including site layout planning, cooling system evaluations, and cost and schedule development.
It recently raised as much as $500 million from the debt market for the development of Project Matador, and support its target of delivering an initial 2.3 GW of power.
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