Major Stocks Making News: Amazon, Tesla, Lululemon, More

Crude futures are hovering around the $51 per barrel mark early Wednesday morning, with traders looking forward to today’s EIA weekly report. Among the stocks trending this morning are Lululemon Athletica inc. (NASDAQ:LULU), Renren Inc (NYSE:RENN), Tesla Motors Inc (NASDAQ:TSLA), Blackstone Group LP (NYSE:BX), and Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN). We’ll dig into why investors are paying attention to these stocks today and see how the smart money is positioned in them.

At Insider Monkey, we track around 765 hedge funds and institutional investors. Through extensive backtests, we have determined that imitating some of the stocks that these investors are collectively bullish on, can help retail investors generate double digits of alpha per year. The key is to focus on the small-cap picks of these funds, which are usually less followed by the broader market and allow for larger price inefficiencies (see the details here).

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Lululemon Turns In Mixed Quarter

Lululemon Athletica inc. (NASDAQ:LULU) is 3% higher in pre-market trading after reporting fiscal first quarter earnings of $0.30 per share on revenue of $495.5 million, missing the consensus estimate by $0.01 per share on the bottom-line and beating expectations by $7.78 million on the top-line. Sales rose by 17% year-over-year, led by comparable-store sales which inched up by 3% year-over-year and direct-to-consumer sales which rose by 17.6% year-over-year. Management expects fiscal year 2016 revenue of $2.305 billion-to-$2.345 billion and diluted EPS of $2.08-to-$2.18. Lululemon Athletica inc. (NASDAQ:LULU) was in the portfolios of 28 funds in our database at the end of March, up by six from the beginning of January.

Renren Reports Earnings

Renren Inc (NYSE:RENN), a leading real-name social networking internet platform in China, reported a loss of $0.03 per share on $10.78 million in revenue for the first quarter, compared to a loss of $0.02 per share and revenue of $8.34 million in the first quarter of 2015. Gross profit in the latest quarter was $2.4 million, as the company continues to find new ways to create shareholder value. Given that the stock trades below book value, shareholders hope management can execute to unlock further shareholder value. The company ended March with over $76 million in cash and cash equivalents. Of the 766 elite funds in Insider Monkey’s database, 6 funds owned $8.67 million worth of Renren Inc (NYSE:RENN) shares at the end of the first quarter.

On the next page we examine why Tesla, Blackstone Group, and Amazon are in the news this morning.