Stocks rose Monday on a bounce back rally in tech shares after investors rotated out of growth names in favor of small-caps last week. The broader market index S&P 500 (NYSE: SPY) rose over 1% in afternoon trade, while the Nasdaq Composite (NASDAQ: QQQ) advanced 1.5% and the Dow Jones Industrial Average (NYSE: DIA) added nearly 90 points.
In Focus:
CrowdStrike (NASDAQ: CRWD) shares fell lower on Monday as the cybersecurity software provider continued to help clients recover from the outage that impacted millions of Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) Windows devices on Friday. The stock fell 11% on Friday at the start of the global outage, and the company said Sunday it was testing a method that could repair affected machines faster.
Guggenheim Securities downgraded CrowdStrike shares to Neutral from Buy on Sunday, with analysts led by John DiFucci noting that it may take time for the company to repair its image and signings could be impacted in the near-term.
"We still have the utmost respect for the leadership team at CrowdStrike and believe that the company will eventually become even stronger as a result of this incident, and if investors have a multi-year horizon, they can ride it out," the analysts wrote. "However, we find it difficult to tell investors that they need to buy CRWD right now."
Goldman Sachs, on the other hand, reiterated their Buy rating on the stock on Monday, with analysts led by Gabriela Borges expecting CrowdStrike's deals to take longer to close between the time of the outage and July 31.
"Out recent conversations reaffirm our view that there will likely be minimal share shifts in endpoint post this event -- although we recognize that additional details in the postmortem will further inform this view," the analysts wrote in a note.
Delta Air Lines (NYSE: DAL) notably cancelled over 4,600 flights from Friday through Sunday, according to data from OAG cited by CNBC. American Airlines (NASDAQ: AAL) said it was almost back to normal on Saturday and United Airlines (NASDAQ: UAL) has canceled 9% of its schedule, according to FlightAware.
Delta CEO Ed Bastian said in a note to customers that Delta uses a number of Microsoft tools that went offline in the outage; "in particular, one of our crew tracking-related tools was affected and unable to effectively process the unprecedented number of changes triggered by the system shutdown."
In the News:
Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway (NYSE: BRK.A) sold 33.9 million shares of Bank of America (NYSE: BAC) for almost $1.5 billion in separate sales on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday, a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filing showed. This was the first time since the fourth quarter of 2019 that the conglomerate reduce its stake in the bank, which remains Berkshire's second-largest equity position after Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL).
On the Earnings Front:
Verizon Communications (NYSE: VZ) missed estimates for its second-quarter revenue on Monday as phone upgrades slowed in the United States as price-sensitive consumers choose to keep their old phones for longer-than-previous trends.
The telecom added 148,000 net monthly bill-paying wireless phone subscribers from April to June, above estimates, with additions boosted by its myPlan which allows customers pay for only what they need and its partnerships with streaming services such as Netflix (NASDAQ: NFLX), Warner Bros. Discovery (NASDAQ: WBD) and Disney (NYSE: DIS) to offer promotional bundles.