3 Stocks Getting Clobbered Today For Very Different Reasons

The market is enduring a rough day following the Fed failing to pull the trigger yesterday on an expected and long-awaited interest rate hike. Among the day’s biggest losers are Parsley Energy Inc (NYSE:PE), La Quinta Holdings Inc (NYSE:LQ), and Freeport-McMoRan Inc (NYSE:FCX), each trading on high volume. We’ll dig into these nose-diving stocks to see if they’re unwitting casualties of the current market jitters or have deeper issues dragging them down.

Parsley Energy Inc (NYSE:PE)

• Investors with Long Positions (as of June 30): 25
• Aggregate Value of Investors’ Holdings (as of June 30): $381 million
• Percentage of Shares Owned by Investors: 20.20%

Let’s start with Parsley Energy, which is trading down by 8.04% today after trending upwards all week. The oil and natural gas company, which has assets in the Permian Basin, announced a public offering of 13 million shares of common stock, which will send the above figure of over 20% share ownership by the investors we track plummeting along with the stock. The company announced that it will use the proceeds from the offering to pay down some of its debt and to fund its capital expenditures, which could include acquisitions.

As far as energy stocks go, Parsley Energy Inc (NYSE:PE) was having a pretty solid year up until today, trading slightly up year-to-date. Hedge funds tracked by Insider Monkey exhibited mixed feelings towards the stock however. While ownership was up by two funds during the second quarter, the value of their aggregate holdings declined by $71 million, even though the stock was up by about 9% during the quarter, so there was a good deal of profit-taking. Each of the top two shareholders of the stock within our database trimmed their holdings during the second quarter. They were Stuart J. Zimmer’s Zimmer Partners and Israel Englander’s Millennium Management, and owned 5.04 million shares and 4.22 million shares respectively.

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