Why Hanesbrands, Salesforce, ArcelorMittal, Lions Gate & Splunk Are Plummeting Today

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The markets are back to tumbling on Friday, along with oil, as dozens of stocks have seen major decreases on high trading volume. All major U.S stock indexes were trading down in the early afternoon, partly driven by the declines in the shares of Hanesbrands Inc. (NYSE:HBI), salesforce.com, inc. (NYSE:CRM), ArcelorMittal SA (ADR) (NYSE:MT), Lions Gate Entertainment Corp. (USA) (NYSE:LGF), and Splunk Inc (NASDAQ:SPLK), which have registered considerable losses during the trading session. Let’s take a look into the events behind said declines, as well as into what the hedge funds in our database think about these companies.

Imitating hedge funds and other institutional investors can help identify some of the most profitable stocks on the market. However, our extensive research that covered the period between 1999 and 2012, showed that the best approach is to follow these investors into their small-cap stocks. Our backtests showed that the 15 most popular small-cap stocks among hedge funds managed to generate a monthly alpha of 81 basis points, versus an alpha of 0.7 percentage points posted by their top 50 large-cap picks (see more details here).

Back to the stocks that interest us, we’ll start with Hanesbrands Inc. (NYSE:HBI), down by more than 14% today after the company announced its fourth quarter financial results. After the market closed on Thursday, the manufacturer and marketer of apparel reported earnings of $0.44 per share on revenue of $1.41 billion, missing the Street’s consensus of $0.46 per share in earnings and $1.53 billion in revenue.

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A hedge fund that is probably not happy with the news is John Shapiro’s Chieftain Capital, which disclosed ownership of 9.2 million shares of Hanesbrands Inc. (NYSE:HBI) as of the end of the third quarter of 2015. The stake accounted for more than 3.2% of the company’s total shares, and made Chieftain the largest hedge fund shareholder of record in our database as of September 30.

Next up is salesforce.com, inc. (NYSE:CRM), down by about 12% in the early afternoon. It seems like the decline was prompted by the lukewarm results and weak guidance issued by Tableau Software Inc (NYSE:DATA) and LinkedIn Corp (NYSE:LNKD) on Thursday evening, which sent several major tech stocks crashing.

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Probably happy about his decision to exit a position in salesforce.com, inc. (NYSE:CRM) is Philippe Laffont. His fund, Coatue Management declared having sold all of its 557,922 shares of the company during the third quarter, closing out its stake.

On the next page we will take a look at the reasons behind the tumbles seen at ArcelorMittal SA (ADR) (NYSE:MT), Lions Gate Entertainment Corp. (USA) (NYSE:LGF), and Splunk Inc (NASDAQ:SPLK).

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