Monday proved a bad day for broadcast media giant Tegna (NYSE:TGNA) after it put out its earnings report. The numbers that came back disappointed on pretty much every front, and investors reacted about as you’d expect. Indeed, Tegna stock is down over 19% at the time of writing.
Tegna posted earnings per share of $0.98, which was significantly less than the $1.07 analysts expected. Further, revenue was also a miss, coming in at $917.13 million against the $944.90 million expected. The only bright spot was that revenue was up 18.4% year-over-year.
However, that wasn’t the only problem for Tegna, either; its planned sale to Standard General took a serious hit as the Federal Communications Commission weighed in. It said that it was sending the deal to an administrative law judge. That’s sufficient to basically “kill(ing) the deal,” according to Benchmark analysts. Benchmark’s own Daniel Kurnos offered up a note on the deal, saying that the FCC seems to believe that something fishy is going on with the deal and shut it down.
As a result, it’s not surprising that Hedge fund confidence in Tegna is on the negative side of Neutral right now. In fact, Hedge funds reduced their holdings by 124,300 shares last quarter.
