Pulse of the Market: Wednesday’s 10 Worst Performers

Shares on Wall Street bounced back from a bloodbath, with all main indices ending in the green on Wednesday, as investors cheered the Federal Reserve’s decision to keep interest rates unchanged.

The tech-heavy Nasdaq led the gains, rallying 1.41 percent, followed by the S&P 500 with a 1.08 percent gain, and the Dow Jones, by 0.92 percent.

Meanwhile, 10 companies defied overall market optimism, booking losses during the trading session. In this article, let’s take a look at the 10 worst-performing stocks and explore the reasons behind their drop.

To come up with the list, we considered only the companies with a $2-billion market capitalization and $5 million in trading volume.

A man in a black suit holding a tablet looks at stock market data on a monitor. Photo by Tima Miroshnichenko on Pexels

10. Cognex Corp. (NASDAQ:CGNX)

Cognex Corp. saw its share prices drop by 3.49 percent on Wednesday to close at $31.21 apiece as investor caution lingered amid a generally bearish sentiment that pushed the company down to an all-time low last week.

Just recently, 13 analysts lowered their earnings expectations for CGNX as it navigates a challenging market environment.

TD Cowen, for its part, reduced its price target for CGNX by 21 percent to $30 from $38 previously while maintaining a “hold” rating. Meanwhile, DA Davidson lowered its price target to $35 from $39 while keeping a neutral rating.

UBS also adjusted its price target for the company to $56, down from its $58 projected earlier, but assigned a “buy” rating.

Goldman Sachs decreased its target to $35, maintaining a “sell” rating following a mixed earnings performance and a cautious outlook for the first quarter of the year.

9. Rigetti Computing Inc. (NASDAQ:RGTI)

Rigetti Computing fell for a third straight day on Wednesday, losing 3.46 percent to finish at $9.90, in line with its counterparts, as investors repositioned portfolios ahead of Nvidia Corp.’s (NASDAQ:NVDA) much-anticipated Quantum Day.

NVDA is set to hold the Quantum Day on Thursday where industry leaders are expected to join NVDA CEO Jensen Huang in a discussion about the trends in the industry.

It can be recalled that Huang earlier commented that the quantum computing industry is not expected to be very useful in the next 15 to 30 years, a view that was similarly shared by Meta Platforms CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

In other recent news, RGTI entered into a share purchase agreement with Quanta Computer, involving the latter’s purchase of $35 million RGTI shares at a price of $11.59 apiece.

Following the investment, the two parties would jointly invest $100 million over the next five years for the development of quantum computers.