Trending Stocks: Yahoo, HP Inc, EQT, and More

With earnings season revving up, traders are glued to the price action and news flow coming out of the broader market, which has opened in the green on the last trading day of the week.

Among the stocks that traders are paying attention to today are Verizon Communications Inc. (NYSE:VZ), Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ:YHOO), HP Inc (NYSE:HPQ), EQT Corporation (NYSE:EQT), and EQT Midstream Partners LP (NYSE:EQM). Let’s take a closer look at the latest concerning the five stocks and analyze relevant hedge fund sentiment towards them.

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The hacking fallout for Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ:YHOO) may not be over for investors after Verizon Communications Inc. (NYSE:VZ)‘s General Counsel Craig Silliman said that there was a “reasonable basis” to think that the massive Yahoo hack in 2014 constituted a material impact on Verizon’s deal to buy Yahoo. Specifically, Silliman said:

“I think we have a reasonable basis to believe right now that the impact is material and we’re looking to Yahoo to demonstrate to us the full impact. If they believe that it’s not then they’ll need to show us that.. [we] absolutely evaluating [the breach] and will make determinations about whether and how to move forward with the deal based on our evaluation of the materiality.”

Verizon CEO Lowell McAdam previously commented that the talk of Verizon trying to knock down the price of Yahoo’s internet properties by $1 billion was just speculation. Of the 749 hedge funds that we track which filed 13Fs for the June quarter, 81 were long Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ:YHOO) as of June 30, while 52 were shareholders of Verizon Communications Inc. (NYSE:VZ).

HP Inc (NYSE:HPQ) shares are 1.2% in the red after the company released its fiscal year 2017 financial outlook. For the period, HP’s management estimates that the company’s free cash flow will come in between $2.3 billion and $2.6 billion, and that adjusted EPS will be in the range of $1.55-to-$1.65 per share. HP further expects to return 50%-75% of that fiscal 2017 free cash flow to shareholders through dividend and share repurchases. To that end, the company has increased its planned quarterly dividend by 7% and has announced an add-on of $3 billion to its share buyback authorization. HP will also restructure its workforce so that a net total of 3,000-to-4,000 employees exit the company between its fiscal years 2017 and 2019. HP expects the employee exits to yield $200 million-to-$300 million in gross annual run rate savings beginning in its fiscal 2020. Charles De Vaulx‘s International Value Advisers owned 731,953 shares of HP Inc (NYSE:HPQ) at the end of the second quarter, down by 71% from the end of the first quarter.

On the next page we’ll find out why EQT Corporation and EQT Midstream Partners LP are in the spotlight.

EQT Midstream Partners LP (NYSE:EQM) and EQT Corporation (NYSE:EQT) are in the spotlight after the former acquired transmission, storage, and gathering assets from the latter for $275 million in cash effective October 1. EQT Midstream expects the deal to be immediately accretive to its distributable cash flow per unit and the company will fund the purchase with borrowings from its credit facility. The gathering systems are expected to generate EBITDA of $16 million in 2017 and $30 million in 2018, while the transmission and storage assets are expected to generate $31 million in EBITDA in 2017 and $35 million in EBITDA in 2018.

According to our data, 36 hedge funds that we track were bullish on EQT Corporation (NYSE:EQT) at the end of the second quarter, while 11 were long EQT Midstream Partners LP (NYSE:EQM).

Disclosure: None