Why These 5 Stocks Tumbled As Markets Surged Today

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After closing up marginally on Thursday, the markets are now surging today, with all major U.S stock indexes registering gains of 0.4%-to-0.5%. However, a few stocks are seeing marked declines. Among them, we can count H & R Block Inc (NYSE:HRB), Symantec Corporation (NASDAQ:SYMC), Nimble Storage Inc (NYSE:NMBL), Vitae Pharmaceuticals Inc (NASDAQ:VTAE), and Clean Energy Fuels Corp (NASDAQ:CLNE). Let’s take a look at the events behind these fluctuations, and into what the hedge funds in our database think about these companies.

At Insider Monkey, we track more than 700 hedge funds, whose 13F filings we analyze as part of our small-cap strategy. Our research has shown that imitating a portfolio that includes the 15 most popular small-cap stocks among hedge funds can outperform the market by as much as 95 basis points per month on average (see more details here).

Let’s start with H & R Block Inc (NYSE:HRB), which is trading down by almost 17% on Friday afternoon following the announcement of the company’s third quarter financial results for fiscal year 2016. After the market closed on Thursday, the tax preparation and related services provider posted a net loss of $0.34 per share, $0.10 worse than expected, on revenue of $475 million, which was not only down by 6.7% year-over-year, but also missed expectations by $26.78 million. First Eagle Investment Management disclosed ownership of 5.7 million shares of H & R Block Inc (NYSE:HRB) valued at roughly $190 million as of the end of the fourth quarter of 2015.

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Next up is Symantec Corporation (NASDAQ:SYMC), which opened Friday 18.4% below its Thursday closing price of $20.52 per share. While no particular news seemed to be driving the tumble, the decline did come after the payment of a special dividend of $4 per share, which derived from the sale of the company’s Veritas unit. Interestingly, trading volume at midday had already surpassed the stock’s daily average by 25%; this suggests than many investors were selling the stock after they collected the dividend. In fact, the decline in the share price was very close to $4.

Among the firms that profited from this dividend we can count Ken Griffin’s Citadel Investment Group, which disclosed ownership of 7.28 million shares of Symantec Corporation (NASDAQ:SYMC) valued at more than $153 million as of December 31, along with another 28 institutions in our database which held long stakes in the company at the end of the fourth quarter.

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On the next page, we will take a look at the news driving the downward moves in the shares of Nimble Storage Inc (NYSE:NMBL), Vitae Pharmaceuticals Inc (NASDAQ:VTAE), and Clean Energy Fuels Corp (NASDAQ:CLNE).

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