Medicare audits, Advance Auto Parts, solar: Trending Tickers

Yahoo

22-05-2025

The US Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services have announced Medicare Advantage audits on health insurers, with this news sending shares of Humana (HUM), UnitedHealth Group (UNH), and CVS Health (CVS) lower.
Advance Auto Parts (AAP) stock skyrockets by over 40% on Thursday after the car parts retailer reaffirmed its full-year earnings guidance alongside its first quarter beat on estimates.
Solar companies Sunrun (RUN), Enphase Energy (ENPH), and SolarEdge Technologies (SEDG) are taking a stock hit after the House advanced President Trump's tax bill to the Senate, the spending package outlining plans to eliminate clean energy tax credits.
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Now time for some of today's trending tickers. We're watching health insurers, advanced auto parts, and solar stocks. First of all, let's talk about health insurance stocks. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services announcing an expansion of Medicare advantage audits. Humana is taking the biggest hit of the big insurers. It's down about 4%. United Health down slightly, but of course, it has been tumbling as of late. CVS down a little more than 2%. This increases and broadens the scrutiny that these plans had already been under here. Um, you know, United Health, some of its plans under investigation. Jeremy Schwartz is still with me here. Insurance stocks, I mean, obviously, it's been led mostly by United Health. Yeah. But it's been a tough slog for many of them.
Yeah. You know, they've had all sorts of idiosyncratic stories with the CEO issues as well. The, you know, they came under fire also from Trump when he talked about trying to cut prescription drug prices, these big numbers, like 30 to 80%. And it's like the pharmacy benefit managers, the PBMs are Yeah.
for United a bigger source of revenue than for Humana, but it's as much as a third of their revenue might come from some of these PBMs. And if they're, who's going to be hurt if they actually can get avoid some of the PBM managers that's trying to lower the prices? They are coming under attack from that element within the administration.
Right. So, sort of multiple fronts at this point when it comes to um the regulatory scrutiny of these companies. Next up, we're also watching Advanced Auto Parts. Those shares are soaring after the company reaffirmed its full-year guidance. The car part retail parts retailer also topping first quarter expectations. The CEO says tariffs have created a quote highly dynamic economic environment, but the company is expecting to make progress on mitigation um options. Now, I don't know about you, Jeremy, whenever I see a move like this Yeah.
in response to earnings which seems so outsized, I go straight to short interest. And indeed, Advanced Auto Parts, according to Bloomberg data, has about 18% of its float is shorted, which is high for those of you out there, so you could be seeing a short squeeze in addition to whatever underlying move there is.
Yeah. You think about some of the prime stocks that are at the risk of tariffs, and car parts have been a key discussion. If you have these 25% tariffs and where they produce around the world, this could be one of those key areas. Uh and then you get the actual results and now Yeah.
it's we haven't seen the actual tariffs yet. The tariffs are just starting to come in, and you'll start to see them from you know, the next few weeks is actually when you're going to start to see some of that. But it's one of those stocks that was prime focus Right.
hit because of that expectation, but you could beat you beat earnings and you're a Yeah.
Yeah. I mean, this company's been trying to turn itself around. They've closed some poorly performing stores. Comparable sales still fell by 6/10 of 1%, but that was a lot better than the 2% decline that analysts had been anticipated. And finally, let's look at solar stocks. They are falling after the house passed that tax bill. It terminates clean key clean energy credits a little bit sooner than had been anticipated. The legislation ending those tax credits for installers that lease equipment to customers. Some analysts call the bill worse than fear. Now they don't phase out right away, but they will phase out sooner than had been anticipated. If this bill goes through as this current draft is showing here, you see Sunrun taking a tumble, 38%. Enphase down about 15%. Solar Edge down about 25%. Now these companies sit at different parts of the stack. Sunrun is the installer. Enphase, um, its equipment basically helps transmit the solar power through batteries into the electricity of the house. Solar Edge also. So they sort of are affected differently depending on where you're looking. We could see changes to the bill, as our Ben Worshkow said earlier. Some of the states that are red states actually have depended on these credits, and that's where the solar companies are. So we'll see how it turns out, but those are big, big moves.
Well, tying back to the lead off of this section, which was Nvidia, you know, what the number one story is AI power demand. What do you need for these chips? You need power. You need energy. So there's this trade where the utilities, we're trading a lot like AI plays, and you have a lot of the big energy companies needing solar as part of the it's not a substitution, it's an an. It's we call it not just energy transition, it's energy addition. You need more energy. So how I I think some of the case for solar is actually there for the long run. Now, how do how does administration support it? What are the credits versus the demand and needs?
But whether it's nuclear, solar, natural gas, all sorts of energy, we're going to need a lot more of it.
Right. And um, you know, to your point there, um, I was also looking, by the way, some of the nuclear companies because there are some provisions in the bill related to them. And we're seeing some increases there. So we'll see how it all turns out when the Senate gets the bill back. And you can scan the QR code below to track the best and worst performing stocks with Yahoo Finance's Trending Tickers page.