What Happened in the Stock Market Today

After flirting with huge declines in the immediate wake of president-elect Donald Trump's surprising victory, stocks produced solid gains on Wednesday. The Dow Jones Industrial Average (^DJI -0.17%) and the S&P 500 (^GSPC -0.07%) indexes each finished higher by more than 1%.

Today's stock market:

Data source: Yahoo Finance.

Banks were some of the biggest winners on the day, and that momentum lifted the Financial Sector Select SPDR Fund (XLF -0.18%) higher by 4%. World markets didn't react to the election news with as much optimism though, and the Emerging Market Index Fund (EEM 0.26%) fell by 3%.

Meanwhile, TripAdvisor (TRIP -0.75%) and GoPro (GPRO -1.40%) sat out the broader market rally and made big moves lower on Wednesday.

TripAdvisor's slow growth

TripAdvisor shares plunged by 16% following its third-quarter earnings report. In that announcement, the travel booking specialist revealed surprisingly weak sales growth trends: Revenue ticked up by 1%, compared to consensus estimates calling for 5% gains .

The company's switch to instant booking continued to weigh on results by lowering advertising revenue for the hotel business. TripAdvisor's growth was also hurt by the shift to mobile devices and away from its desktop platform. A soft overall travel industry and increased competition contributed to the slowdown, too. Overall, click-based and transaction revenue per hotel shopper improved to a 12% decline from the prior quarter's 19% slump.

Despite those challenges, management stressed the fact that negative growth trends appeared to level off by the end of the quarter. "Total average monthly unique hotel shopper growth stabilized in the quarter, and improved each month from the soft June and July," executives explained in a conference call .

Looking ahead, TripAdvisor is using its instant bookings function, which has just passed a year of operation in the U.S., to gain valuable insight into customer behavior so it can improve the purchase process and produce higher conversion rates. That's a long-term process, though, since vacation travel isn't a frequent purchase for most shoppers. In the meantime investors can expect sluggish growth and click-based revenue trends that, while improving, remain in negative territory, year-over-year.

GoPro's bad Karma

GoPro's stock took another hit after the sport camera maker announced the complete recall of its Karma drone product that launched late last month. And as if news of the quality control issues wasn't bad enough, investors also learned that just 2,500 drones had been sold since the product was released on October 23 .

Image source: GoPro.

CEO Nicholas Woodman and his executive team are doing the right thing in clawing back the few devices that had made it into consumers' hands so far. Apparently, a small proportion of the drones suffer from power failure episodes that could pose a threat to people in the flight path. "We have moved quickly to recall all units of Karma and provide a full refund while we investigate the issue," Woodman said in a press release.

Since it's tiny, the recall isn't likely to produce a big loss for the company. It probably won't even get in the way of the hefty sales growth that the company expects this holiday season. Still, the news adds even more pressure on the latest lineup of Hero cameras to deliver this year's gains and put GoPro back on track to revenue growth following this year's 40% sales plunge.