Yahoo Finance

It's now time for some of today's trending tickers. Scan the QR code below to track the best and worst performing stocks of this session with Yahoo Finances trending tickers page. Joining me now is co-host of Market Domination, Julie Heyman, and Julie, first up, we're going to talk about Intuitive Machines sinking here after ending its lunar lander mission early after faulty landing. And this is the second setback here after a similar problem that the company had last year. I believe the stock dip here, you can see it's down about 20%. That is the worst dip that we've seen here for Intuitive Machines since February of 2024. What else are you looking at?

So, the stock is down today. It was down very sharply yesterday and kept being halted because of volatility. Yesterday's the day that the company's Athena Lander landed on the surface of the moon. What happened the first time that it had a lander land on the moon is, it sort of was fell over sideways. The landing had some issues, and so it wasn't able to complete the mission. So there were a lot of hopes riding on this second mission. It had a successful landing, but there were a lot of questions yesterday about kind of the status of the lander once it had landed. And indeed, the company came out today and said basically it didn't land the way it was supposed to. So they said in a statement, the direction of the sun, the orientation of the solar panels, extreme cold temperatures in the crater where it landed, they said they don't expect it to recharge. It was able to do a couple of the things there that it was supposed to do, but ultimately, one of its missions was to go out and collect dirt samples to try and find evidence of water, and it wasn't able to go out and do that. So, you know, this is obviously a setback. There are some analysts who are saying they want to wait for more information. There's at least one analyst who said the reaction is overdone. Regardless, it's a big reaction.

Yeah, it certainly, it certainly is a big reaction. And then if I'm remembering from conversations with other investors in the space space that we have had, this is one of the ways for retail investors to be able to play space exploration, so potentially seen some pain in that trade today. But another stock that we want to talk about together here, Smith and Wesson shares tumbling on the back of those weak third quarter sales results here, reporting those weaker than expected third quarter results and saying full-year revenue is expected to be at the lower end of its previously provided range here. I wonder what's driving some of the weak demand that we are seeing for Smith and Wesson.

So what's interesting is, um, Smith and Wesson, a gun maker, subject to the same consumer spending trends that any consumer product would be subject to. And so the company talking about, um, buyers sort of migrating to lower end guns. That's something that's been affecting them. Um, that forecast that you mentioned for the full year is a 5 to 10% decrease from 2024, and they're now saying it's more going to be more like 10% than 5% because of, in part, some of the macroeconomic trends that they are watching. Uh, we did see the National Background Check data for February show a decline in gun sales overall. Um, so, you know, sort of, it seems like they are subject to some of those macro trends that are affecting the industry. One interesting thing here, um, they make the guns in the US. So there was a question on the call about tariffs. It doesn't seem like that they are that affected by tariffs, maybe some of their components come from abroad, but they are mostly insulated from that effect. Nonetheless, you know, also, it bears mentioning that gun sales tend to do better in democratic, um, administrations versus Republican ones, and especially leading up to elections where Democrats end up being successful. And that's because there is sort of less concern about regulations changing to limit the sales of guns. So that's a trend that we have tended to see in the back, in the past. We'll see how that plays out for the rest of the year.

I would not have known that, but that makes sense that you, that you see that trend. And I, I would be curious to learn more about the income level of their consumer too, just given that if they're not going to be impacted by tariffs, maybe it's also a good indicator of kind of which income groups are struggling just due to the broader macro environment right now.

Right. They did, they did talk about some of their higher end products as well, that some of them are holding up relatively well. Um, but you know, again, we'll see how that, how that progresses over the course of the year.