By Geoffrey Smith
Investing.com -- Stocks in focus in premarket trade on Wednesday, 8th April. Please refresh for updates
- Spirit Aerosystems (NYSE:SPR) stock was up 5.0% after the aviation supplier said it had stopped production for Boeing (NYSE:BA) indefinitely and will furlough workers on Boeing supply projects in Kansas and Oklahoma.
- The announcement comes as Spirit’s previous two-week suspension of work for Boeing draws to a close.
McDonald’s (NYSE:MCD) stock was down 1.3% after the burger chain announced a 22% drop in same-store sales in March, illustrating its vulnerability to the Covid-19 pandemic.
- eHealth (NASDAQ:EHTH) stock was down 16% after short-seller Carson Block’s Muddy Waters Research announced a short position in the online health marketplace.
- Block told CNBC that the company uses aggressive accounting techniques to mask a lack of underlying profitability.
- Muddy Waters had announced a short position on Tuesday in Chinese Netflix (NASDAQ:NFLX) wannabe iQIYI (NASDAQ:IQ). iQIYI stock rose 3.2% on the day but was down 5.1% in premarket trade on Wednesday.
- Marathon Oil (NYSE:MRO) stock rose 4.1% after the upstream producer announced further cuts to its capital spending budget in response to the low price environment.
- The new capex budget of $1.3 billion for 2020 is around half of last year’s spending. The company will suspend drilling in north Delaware and implement ‘frac holidays’ in the current quarter in its properties in the Bakken and Eagle Ford shale formations.
United Parcel Service (NYSE:UPS) stock was up 4.0% and FedEx (NYSE:FDX) stock was up 5.0% after reports that Amazon.com (NASDAQ:AMZN) is suspending a third-party delivery service that threatened to compete directly with them.
Amazon currently needs all its delivery capacity to meet a surge in online shopping as the country’s physical retail sector has all-but closed down in recent weeks.
Zoom Video Communications (NASDAQ:ZM) stock was up 2.1% after the video conference call software maker hired former Facebook (NASDAQ:FB) executive Alex Stamos as an advisor to help it address burgeoning concerns about its privacy policies.
The German Foreign Ministry has reportedly banned the use of Zoom software in response to recent reports about security failings.
New York Mortgage Trust (NASDAQ:NYMT) stock was up 40% after the real estate investor said it now current with its repo and margin requirements. The company had said it was unable to meet margin calls in March.