Why J C Penney Company (JCP), Herbalife (HLF) and GoPro (GPRO) Are 3 of Today’s Worst Stocks

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The bulls gave it a great effort on Friday, but just couldn’t hold the sellers off, ending the trading week as well as the month on a slightly bearish foot. The S&P 500 closed at 2104.50 today, down 0.3%.

A handful of stocks would have loved to slide only that much lower. GoPro Inc. (NASDAQ:GPRO), J C Penney Company Inc. (NYSE:JCP) and Herbalife Ltd. (NYSE:HLF) all took much, much bigger losses.

J C Penney Company (JCP)

Why J C Penney Company Inc., Herbalife Ltd. and GoPro Inc. Are 3 of Today's Worst StocksMaybe J C Penney Company isn’t on the road to recovery after all. Though revenue of $3.893 million was better than the expected $3.879 million and same-store sales were up 4.4%, the breakeven fourth quarter was well shy of the expected profit of 11 cents per share of JCP stock.

The real trouble for the stock’s price, however, may have been 2015’s free cash flow guidance — J C Penney doesn’t expect to see any growth in free cash flow this year despite a projected 3% to 5% improvement in same-store sales. It loosely suggests the retailer isn’t widening margins the way some investors were hoping it would by now.

JCP was down 7% by market close.

Herbalife (HLF)

Herbalife managed to partially top analyst estimates last quarter, earning $1.41 per share of HLF stock on $1.13 billion in revenue. The pros were only looking for a bottom line of $1.22 per share, but were also modeling a top line of $1.16 billion.

On the other hand, the current quarter and current year forecast were dire enough to send HLF stock sharply south, to the tune of nearly 11%. The health supplement company reported it’s expecting sales to fall somewhere between 6% and 9% in 2015.

On a profit basis, the company now believes it will earn between $4.10 and $4.50 per share of HLF stock in 2015, down from prior estimates in the $5.45 to $5.75 range.

GoPro (GPRO)

Just when GoPro investors think things can’t get any worse, they get worse.

GPRO stock once again fell to new multi-week lows on Friday, sinking 6% on the heels of a less-than-impressed Oppenheimer analyst Andrew Uerkwitz. Uerkwitz, who currently rates GPRO stock as an “underperform”, doesn’t feel the company’s current strategy to leverage YouTube as a revenue-generating platform in itself is going to bear much fruit. He specifically said:

“Anybody that’s trying to value GoPro on a media strategy doesn’t fully understand the story and should really look at this as a hardware play.”

Uerkwitz went on to point out that although GoPro had up until this point been able to keep its wearable-camera competition at bay, Chinese smartphone company Xiaomi was close to launching such a product. In fact, Xiaomi could potentially keep GoPro from getting any real traction in China … one of the markets it was looking too for real growth.

As of this writing, James Brumley did not hold a position in any of the aforementioned securities.

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Article printed from InvestorPlace Media, https://investorplace.com/2015/02/jcp-stock-hlf-stock-gpro-stock/.

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