Unlikely Names Join Russell Value Indexes

Every fourth Friday of June, the popular Russell indexes are reconstituted, shaking things up for traders and investors alike. 📋

Among this year’s rebalance, one of the most significant changes was the shift of Meta, Netflix, Paypal, and Zoom from the Russell 1000 Growth Index into the Russell 1000 Value Index. 🐌

These high-flying tech names have cooled significantly, with shares plummeting year-to-date and over the last year. 🥶

As interest rates rose over the last year, companies like these faced a double whammy.

Higher interest rates made financing their growth more expensive, and it reduced the multiple that investors were willing to pay for their earnings. 📉

As a result, you saw their businesses slow and stock prices re-rated to the downside as investors moved the capital to more cyclical or “value” areas of the market like financials, industrials, materials, etc.

These stocks have been hammered and now have lower price-to-book and growth values, so they’ve met the index provider’s “value index” specifications. 📊

The last decade has been all about growth stocks, but value stocks have outperformed on a relative basis over the last year or so. Whether or not that continues remains to be seen, but this shakeup in index constituents is worth paying attention to.

You can read the full summary of this year’s reconstitution here. 👀

Chinese Smartphone Maker Unveils EV

Chinese smartphone giant Xiaomi is entering the highly competitive electric vehicle (EV) market, revealing its first electric car this weekend. 👀

The consumer electronics company unveiled its SU7 sedan, which it says it spent more than $1.4 billion to develop. The vehicle is set to roll out in China next year and is attempting to do something Faraday Future and other competitors have failed to do: create a software-focused vehicle that matches the technology people find in their phones to what’s happening in their cars. 

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Pfizer’s Flop Continues

It’s been a rough ride for pharmaceutical giant Pfizer since the end of the pandemic, and that rollercoaster ride continues today. 🎢

The company last announced earnings in October but needed to update Wall Street on its 2024 forecast. It cited weak demand for its Covid products as the reason for a weaker-than-anticipated revenue and earnings forecast.

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Japan’s Nippon Takes Over U.S. Steel

After months of bidding, U.S. Steel finally has a buyer. However, the auction’s winner has some parties concerned. 🤔

Japan’s Nippon Steel emerged as the top bidder for the 122-year-old steelmaker, beating out offers from Cleveland-Cliffs, ArcelorMittal, and Nucor. Its $55 per share price represents a 142% premium to where $X shares were trading before Cleveland-Cliffs’ $35-per-share offer kicked off the bidding war.

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Plug Power Is Charged Up

Plug Power hasn’t given investors much to be excited about over the last few years, but today’s news has people (and its stock price) charged up again. So let’s see what happened. 👇

The alternative-energy company, which provides hydrogen fuel cell technology, finalized a deal with the Department of Energy (DOE) for a $1.6 billion loan facility. This critical funding comes at a time when the company has faced immense liquidity issues, issuing a going-corn warning last quarter and disclosing a secondary share offering of up to $1 billion. 💸

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