Stocks seesawed on Thursday, falling in the morning, rising in the afternoon, and then losing steam in the final hour of the session. The Dow Jones Industrial Average (^DJI -0.11%) and the S&P 500 (^GSPC 0.02%) finished with small losses.
Today's stock market
| Index | Percentage Change | Point Change |
|---|---|---|
| Dow | (0.11%) | (27.59) |
| S&P 500 | (0.22%) | (5.99) |
Data source: Yahoo! Finance.
Energy stocks staged a rally as crude oil prices firmed up; the Energy Select Sector SPDR ETF (XLE 0.07%) gained 0.7%. Chinese stocks fell in advance of trade talks at the G-20 summit, with the iShares China Large-Cap ETF (FXI 1.90%) losing 1.6%.
As for individual stocks, Box (BOX -0.07%) announced strong sales growth, while shares of Yeti Holdings (YETI -1.65%) fell following its first public earnings report.
Image source: Getty Images.
Box grows its customer base
Cloud content management company Box reported third-quarter results yesterday that came in ahead of expectations and raised guidance for the full year. Shares were volatile, but eventually closed essentially flat. Revenue grew 20.6% to $155.9 million and the non-GAAP loss per share was $0.06. Analysts were expecting a loss of $0.07 per share on revenue of $154.6 million.
Box added 3,000 new customers in the quarter to bring the total to 90,000 businesses. The company grew the number of deals worth $100,000 or more by over 40% since the period a year ago, and was able to sell add-on products in over 80% of those deals, which was more than 10 percentage points better than last quarter.
Box focuses on selling to large enterprise customers, depending on a strategy of selling software to manage content rather than simply providing cloud storage, and Q3 results suggest the company is making progress.
Yeti leaves investors thirsting for more
Trendy consumer products company Yeti reported earnings for the first time as a public company, but investors weren't impressed, sending shares down 16.2% to $16.10. Net sales in Q3 increased 7.2% to $196.1 million, which was slightly ahead of the $195.1 million analysts were expecting. Adjusted earnings per share expanded 50% to $0.21, which missed the analyst consensus by $0.01.
Wholesale channel sales were flat at $125 million, but direct-to-consumer sales grew 23% to $71.2 million. Gross margin improved 4.8 percentage points to 49.7%.
Yeti, maker of drinkware and coolers, went public at $18 a little over a month ago, but investors have yet to warm up to the stock in spite of unanimous buy ratings from the analysts following it. The company guided to full-year sales growth of between 19% and 20% and adjusted EPS between $0.79 and $0.82, compared with $0.28 last year.
