This Week's News Roundup: Oil Panic & KMI Earnings

To end your work-week and start your weekend off well, the “Stocks in the News” section here at Zacks compiled the top trending finance stories of the week – just in case you did not have the opportunity to read up on what was going on. The top stories of this week primarily focused on poor performances for many companies, as well as the market’s poor performance overall. Without further ado, here are the top trending stories of the week:

1.       Why was the Stock Market Plunging?

U.S. stocks opened poorly on Wednesday, due to a further decline in oil prices that affected equities around the world. According to Reuters, over 1,000 NYSE-listed stocks hit their 52-week lows within the first 20 minutes of trading, the most since last August.

Some of the highlighted incidents include:

• U.S.-produced crude oil traded over 3% lower Wednesday morning, down to almost $27.50 per barrel. This is the lowest level oil has been at since September 2003.
• The Dow Jones Industrial plunged 275 points, or 1.7%, at its opening.
• The S&P 500 was down roughly 1.6% at market open.

By mid-morning trading, the Dow fell 383.91 points, the S&P 500 fell 46.24 points, and the NASDAQ fell 118.61 points

2.       Why were Sprint Shares down Mid-Week?

Shares of the American wireless company Sprint (S) dropped over 14% by Wednesday afternoon. This was due to analysts questioning Sprint’s plan to revamp its network infrastructure; the company hopes to save as much as $1 billion by moving its radio equipment during this upcoming summer to government-owned properties leased from Crown Castle (CCI ) and American Tower (AMT).

Sprint has since rebounded from this poor performance. Shares of the company’s stock are up over 14% as of this afternoon.

3.       Why was Twitter down at the Beginning of the Week?

The Internet’s premier place for outrage, Twitter (TWTR), had another poor day of trading Tuesday. Shares of the social-media company were down over 3% during late-morning trading because of reported technical issues. This setback was the third disruption in five days.

Twitter shares are down nearly 50% in value since late October. Check out this graph to view how poorly Twitter has performed:

4.       Kinder Morgan’s Q4 Earnings Missed Estimate

Energy transportation and storage company Kinder Morgan Inc. (KMI) saw its stocks drop over 3% after the release of its fourth quarter earnings report. The company posted earnings of $0.27, which beat our Zacks Consensus Estimate of $0.17. However, the company reported revenue figures of $3.636 billion that missed our estimate of $3.808 billion. Furthermore, they also reported an 8% year-over-year decline in revenues.

Kinder Morgan has rebounded triumphantly since then, seeing shares up about 18.5% in early-morning trading yesterday, and is currently up roughly 11% this afternoon. This increase in stock price coincides with the company’s President and COO Steve Kean reassuring investors that Kinder Morgan’s primary business fine.

During the company’s G4 conference call, Kean stated, “Commodity prices do directly affect us in the CO2 business and a subpart of our midstream business. We also suffered in our bulk terminals business in coal and steel and especially from the bankruptcy of two of our important coal customers. Those things absolutely pulled back our performance without a doubt.”

He continued, “But it is important to remember, particularly in times like these, that our primary business is the transportation and storage of energy commodities for a fee and that the commodities that we handle the most are natural gas and refined products.”

Trending Now: American Express Down Big

Fifteen-digit instead of sixteen-digit credit card company American Express (AXP) is down almost 12% on the day. This precipitous drop in stock price is due to investors not receiving the information in the company’s Q4 earnings report well. Quite frankly, investors may want to be concerned over the report.

American Express reported revenues of $8.4 billion, which missed the Zacks Consensus Estimate of $8.5 billion. Year-over-year revenues saw a drop in 8%. Moreover, American Express announced plans to reduce costs by $1 billion by the end of 2017, confounding some analysts.

"The potential for a $1+ billion gain and restructuring is encouraging, but doesn't address the need for significant strategic change; a lack of interest in private-label M&A is disappointing," wrote Josh Beck at Pacific Crest in a note Thursday, per Business Insider.

The company has seen a steady decrease in stock price for over a year now. They are going to need to do something to generate more revenues. Hopefully the $1 billion cost reduction will help American Express in the long run because in the current short term, stock prices are continuing to plummet.

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