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.

Gordmans Stores tumbled after a poorly received quarterly report. Sales and earnings landed ahead of expectations, but the 4% decline in comps paints an ugly picture of the retailer's popularity during the critical holiday shopping season. Analysts at Stifel Nicolaus and Piper Jaffray downgraded the chain on the news.

JA Solar darkened after posting a substantially larger deficit than Wall Street was expecting. Revenue and shipments exceeded the solar-cell maker's own guidance, but investors were stunned by the massive loss of $2.65 a share.

JA Solar rival Yingli also suffered a double-digit percentage hit on the news. Competitors sometimes are seen as benefiting from weakness -- especially in a case like this, where a fifth consecutive quarter of steeper losses than expected will question JA Solar's very viability -- but this report stung the near-term prospects of solar in general. If JA Solar is losing more money than expected despite topping its solar-products shipping estimates by nearly 20%, it reveals that Yingli and others have been discounting aggressively to move product. For now, the market will steer clear of most of these players.

VirnetX lost more than a third of its value two weeks ago, after a jury decided that Cisco didn't violate its patents. Even though the Internet security software company's patents were validated in the process, chatter this past week that at least one of the tech giants that it had defeated in the past will appeal an earlier ruling on the same patent smacked the shares down.

Finally we have Allot Communications falling -- a lot. Bloomberg reports that shares of the company that helps telecommunications providers track wireless traffic hit a 52-week low on speculation that Europe's economic funk will continue to keep Allot's orders in check. Analysts mentioned in the report think the new orders that Allot has announced so far this year aren't enough to deliver a strong quarter.