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 Magnum Hunter Resources. Investors bailed on Magnum Hunter after the oil and gas explorer bailed on its auditor. Magnum Hunter dismissed PricewaterhouseCoopers after the auditor warned of material weakness in internal controls at the company. Investing in independent oil and gas companies is hard enough without any accounting uncertainties, so it's easy to see why the market turned on Magnum Hunter.

Sarepta Therapeutics slipped after the FDA requested additional information on its experimental treatment targeting Duchenne muscular dystrophy. Sarepta's been nearly a 10-bagger over the past year as excitement builds for its eteplirsen, but the request for more information cools down the optimism.

It was another bad week for miners, but Taseko Mines made things worse by implementing a hedging strategy that will protect itself from falling copper prices. Buying additional put options to cover price declines on the production at its Gibraltar mine is a smart strategy, but it suggests that Taseko is bracing for copper prices to head even lower later this year.

Taseko wasn't the only copper miner to take a double-digit percentage hit. Freeport-McMoRan also tumbled, but it can blame a poorly received quarterly report. The copper and gold miner posted a slight dip in revenue and an even larger decline in profitability.

Nokia posted a smaller loss than Wall Street was forecasting in its latest quarter, but coming up short on the top line was enough to scare investors away. The Finnish handset maker sold a decent number of smartphones, but the appetite for its old-school feature phones continues to drop off in emerging markets.

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