Groupon, Golar, and Western Digital Among 5 Stocks Getting Crushed Today

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It’s been a hectic day on the stock market, with dozens of earnings reports and other material news events sending a multitude of stocks careening wildly in different directions. Among the stocks shooting in the wrong direction today are Molina Healthcare Inc. (NYSE:MOH), Golar LNG Limited (USA) (NASDAQ:GLNG), Groupon Inc (NASDAQ:GRPN), Western Digital Corp (NASDAQ:WDC), and Seagate Technology PLC (NASDAQ:STX). Let’s find out why investors are getting out of these stocks today and see how top hedge funds tracked by Insider Monkey have been trading these equities of late.

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Molina Sinks on Big Earnings Miss, Analyst Downgrade

Shares of Molina Healthcare Inc. (NYSE:MOH) are off by 19% this afternoon, dragging several other healthcare service providers down with it after the company widely missed earnings estimates, despite a 37% year-over-year jump in revenue to $4.3 billion. Earnings per share fell by 23% year-over-year to $0.43, being partly impacted by a greater than 100-basis-point increase in customer healthcare costs in relation to premium revenue, a figure which jumped to 89.8%. The results prompted Bank of America Merrill Lynch to downgrade Molina Healthcare to ‘Underperform’ from ‘Neutral’ today, further weighing on the stock’s performance. The results will be disappointing for David Keidan‘s Buckingham Capital Management, which added an 80,700-share position in Molina Healthcare Inc. (NYSE:MOH) to its portfolio during the first quarter.

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Fortuna Withdrawal, Analyst Downgrade Sinking Golar

An analyst downgrade and Schlumberger Limited. (NYSE:SLB)‘s withdrawal from a planned 40% stake in Ophir Energy Plc (LON:OPHR)‘s Fortuna LNG project are sinking shares of both Ophir Energy and Golar LNG Limited (USA) (NASDAQ:GLNG) today, with the latter down by 23.66%. Golar’s stock has taken a hit from the development due to its recent agreement with Schlumberger to provide LNG facilities and services to such projects. The scuttled deal also led to DNB Markets downgrading shares of Golar to ‘Hold’ from ‘Buy’ in a note to investors this morning. 29 hedge funds in our database were long Golar LNG Limited (USA) (NASDAQ:GLNG) at the end of December, down from 39 at the end of September.

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Groupon is among three more of the big decliners in today’s session which we’ll analyze on the next page.

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