The bulls started the new trading day out on a bullish foot, shrugging off a surprisingly large drop in housing starts for November.
With some time to think about it though — and with the weekend approaching — traders decided to become net sellers instead. The S&P 500’s close of 2258.07 was 0.18% lower than Thursday’s close, and was just enough to leave the market in the red for the week.
It could have been worse though — you could have owned Nordstrom, Inc. (NYSE:JWN), Oracle Corporation (NYSE:ORCL) and Freeport-McMoRan Inc (NYSE:FCX).
These three names were fighting an uphill battle on Friday, and lost it.
Freeport-McMoRan Inc (FCX)
Oil and mineral mining company Freeport-McMoRan didn’t devastate FCX shareholders today, but the 4.2% setback wasn’t exactly a joyous start to the weekend.
The pullback wasn’t prodded by a commodity meltdown. Oil prices were actually up roughly 1.5%, while copper prices edged just a tad lower. Rather, the dip FCX dished out was mostly driven by perception in the wake of two announcements.
One of those was confirmation that Freeport-McMoRan had indeed sold its deepwater properties in the Gulf of Mexico. Though this sale had been planned for months as part of an effort to raise some much needed cash, with the price of crude rebounding in the meantime, some FCX shareholders may have been hoping the deal wouldn’t go through.
At the same time, Freeport-McMoRan confirmed it was forging ahead with a new mining deal in Indonesia. Although it represents a chance to expand its operation, owners of FCX know all too well that mining-related regulatory turmoil in the country could make that project more of a liability than an asset.
Oracle Corporation (ORCL)
Database giant Oracle may have managed to beat last quarter’s earnings estimates even if it fell a little short of the market’s sales expectations. The bulk of the reason ORCL ended Friday down 4.1%, though, was simply that investors still aren’t convinced the company can drive organic growth with its cloud offering.
For its recently completed fiscal third quarter, Oracle earned 61 cents per share on $9.1 billion worth of revenue. The bottom line fell from the year-ago profit figure of 63 cents, though the top line was up. And while income was a penny better per share than anticipated, revenue came up just shy of forecasts.
Though the average ORCL shareholder was disappointed by last quarter’s numbers, a handful of analysts see reason for hope. Rosenblatt Securities analyst Marshall Senk noted:
“Our partner research does point to a significantly larger pipeline for the back half of (fiscal 2017), particularly in cloud ERP (enterprise resource planning) where we continue to see Oracle competing very effectively vs. both SAP (SAP) and Workday (WDAY).”
Nordstrom, Inc. (JWN)
Last but not least, though most retail stocks were deep in the red today, none were hit as hard as Nordstrom on the heels of a key downgrade.
JPMorgan did the deed, downgrading JWN from “neutral” to “underweight,” and simultaneously lowering its price target on the stock to $48, down from $55.
The research and analysis arm of the brokerage house explained that Nordstrom’s key competency is the in-store brick-and-mortar experience, but that means less and less as consumers move to online shopping, where Nordstrom continues to struggle.
JPMorgan doesn’t see any major sales catalysts on the horizon for 2017 either.
JWN closed 8.7% lower on Friday.
As of this writing, James Brumley did not hold a position in any of the aforementioned securities.
