These 10 Companies Led Monday’s Downturn

Wall Street’s major indices kicked off the trading on a positive note, all finishing in the green territory, as investors brushed off fears of growing global trade tensions.

The Dow Jones rose by 0.38 percent, the S&P 500 grew 0.67 percent, while the Nasdaq rallied 0.98 percent.

However, 10 companies defied a broader market optimism, mostly due to a series of stock rating downgrades from investment research companies on the back of poor earnings guidance and dismal earnings performance.

In this article, we will take a look at which companies led the decline and explore the reasons behind their performance.

To come up with Monday’s worst performers, we considered only the stocks with at least $2 billion in market capitalization and $5 million in daily trading volume.

A person with stock market data on a laptop. Photo by Anna Nekrashevich on Pexels

10. Oklo Inc. (NYSE:OKLO)

Shares of Oklo retreated by 3.17 percent on Monday as investors took profits following a surge in its closing price on Friday.

The company recently enjoyed a boost last week from the confirmation of Chris Wright as the Energy department’s chief, especially since he was a member of OKLO’s board of directors.

With Wright’s installation, prospects for nuclear stocks and the energy industry, in general, looked even brighter over the Trump administration’s stance on prioritizing energy demand first over achieving net-zero goals.

Last month, Trump withdrew the US from the Paris climate deal, saying that the zero carbon policies pushed up the prices of energy for homes and businesses, threatened the reliability of energy systems, and undermined energy security.

OKLO, an advanced nuclear technology company, stands to benefit from the government’s energy expansion program.

9. American Airlines Group Inc. (NASDAQ:AAL)

American Airlines dropped 3.20 percent on Monday to finish at $16.62 apiece as investor sentiment was dampened by news of a bomb threat that caused significant delays to one of its flights last week.

The incident on Friday involved AAL flight 2863 set to leave Austin, Texas, which was disrupted for four hours after a young man renamed a WiFi hotspot to “there is a bomb on the flight.”

After no passenger admitted to the wrongdoing, police ordered everybody to deplane for re-screening.

The flight was cleared for takeoff after a few hours, but investors still reacted negatively to the news, selling off positions at the beginning of the week to flock to safer investments, especially as airline stocks are known to be highly sensitive to news related to safety and security issues.