Volatility has ruled the stock market throughout much of April, and Friday was definitely no exception. After big gains on Thursday, markets posted sharp declines on Friday, giving back all of their moves higher from the previous day and then some. For the month, the Dow Jones Industrial Average (^DJI -0.98%) finished lower by 5%, while the S&P 500 (^GSPC -0.46%) suffered a 9% decline and the Nasdaq Composite (^IXIC -0.64%) plunged more than 13%.
|
Index |
Daily Percentage Change |
Daily Point Change |
|---|---|---|
|
Dow |
(2.77%) |
(939) |
|
S&P 500 |
(3.63%) |
(156) |
|
Nasdaq |
(4.17%) |
(537) |
Data source: Yahoo! Finance.
Amid much-watched reports from the largest companies in the world, many investors didn't catch the latest financial reports from some other companies. Both Atlassian (TEAM -0.30%) and VeriSign (VRSN -1.55%) came out with their latest results, and both had good news and some troubling aspects for investors to consider.
Image source: Getty Images.
Atlassian takes a tumble
Shares of Atlassian finished lower by 13.5% on Friday. The workplace collaboration cloud software platform provider's results for its fiscal third quarter ending March 31 featured considerable growth, but investors nevertheless seemed nervous about the sustainability of the company's long-term prospects.
It was hard to find much fault with Atlassian's results. Quarterly revenue rose 30% year over year to $740 million. Subscription-based revenue climbed at an even higher 59% as the company continued its transition to get most of its customers onto the cloud-based version of its platform. Net losses narrowed considerably from year-ago levels.
Yet there were a few things that investors seemed to hang their pessimism on. Adjusted earnings of $0.47 per share fell slightly from year-ago levels, suggesting that bottom-line growth might face headwinds going forward. Perhaps more importantly, Atlassian said that it anticipates total revenue in its fiscal fourth quarter to come in between $710 million and $725 million. A sequential decline at this point wouldn't be good news for the company, and adjusted earnings of $0.24 per share also suggested further challenges for Atlassian to overcome.
Long-time investors will note that Atlassian has historically been quite conservative in its projections for revenue and earnings. Nevertheless, that's not a level of patience that shareholders have for stocks generally in the current market environment.
VeriSign falls to a two-year low
Shares of VeriSign were also down sharply, falling 14%. The domain name registry and internet infrastructure services provider's first-quarter financial results weren't able to satisfy its shareholders fully.
VeriSign's first-quarter numbers showed continued growth at a modest pace. Revenue of $347 million was up more than 7% from year-ago levels. Earnings of $1.43 per share rose by nearly 8% year over year. VeriSign ended the quarter with 174.7 million domain name registrations using the .com and .net domains, up 4% from where the number was 12 months ago.
However, interest in domain name registrations seemed to slow during the period. VeriSign processed 10.2 million new domain name registrations, which was down from the 11.6 million it processed in the first quarter of 2021. Renewal rates for the most recent period for which reliable information was available improved to 74.8%, up from 73.5% in the previous year's period.
VeriSign's near-monopoly status gives it plenty of leverage in its niche, but it still relies on healthy levels of activity in the digital arena in order to bolster its business. Investors seemed concerned that trends are moving against VeriSign, and that could prove problematic for the near future.
