5 of Last Week's Biggest Losers

There's never a shortage of losers in the stock market. Let's take a closer look at five of this past week's biggest sinkers.

Source: Barron's.

Let's start with Allied Nevada Gold. The gold and silver miner proved to be fool's gold after falling woefully short of Wall Street expectations. Allied Nevada earned half as much as the market was expecting, and its $59 million in revenue was a huge miss when pitted against the $81.4 million the pros were modeling.

Allied Nevada also spooked investors by announcing the delay of a construction of a new mill until it can perform some more due diligence. At least one analyst didn't have a problem performing the due diligence, as Cowen downgraded the stock two days after the report.

There will be blood at Nanosphere. The molecular diagnostics company is starting to gain traction for its gram positive blood culture test, but it's not growing as quickly as it thought it would. Nanosphere revised its outlook on Wednesday. It now sees no more than $11 million in revenue on 150 to 200 customer placements. Back in May it was eyeing $13 million to $15 million in revenue with as many as 250 customer placements.

Dendreon surrendered its entire weekly drop on Friday after posting disappointing results. The biotech fell short on both ends of the income statement, as its loss of $0.45 a share on $73.3 million in revenue missed Wall Street's targets of a deficit of $0.42 a share on $75.6 million in revenue.

However, the real bad news came in its outlook. Provenge is Dendreon's moneymaker, and the biotech is warning that the prostate cancer treatment won't see year-over-year growth. Between its costly price tag and heightened competition, investors are getting cold feet ahead of the immunotherapy's likely approval in Europe.

Fusion-io also took a hit this week. The data storage specialist posted a slight decline in revenue for its latest quarter, and adjusted earnings fell even harder. Investors were holding out for improvement on the top line.

Fusion-io is forecasting revenue to climb 20% during the fiscal year that began last month. That may come as a relief after the disappointing quarter it just had, but analysts were holding out for a 30% bounce.

Jamba shares were squeezed after the company poured out ho-hum results. Revenue climbed just 2% in the latest quarter for the parent company of the 829-unit Jamba Juice smoothie chain. Wall Street was betting on 6% top-line growth.

Earnings were in line with expectations, but it was disappointing to see Jamba's stores fail to thrive in a climate of warm temperatures and new menu additions. Jamba did stick to its store-level outlook for all of 2013, but it wasn't enough to satisfy investors that were thirsty for more.

Ready for a bounce
If you owned some of these losers, how about following the smart money into winners?