Why Qualcomm, Shopify, and Mylan Slumped Today

Wall Street was in a generally good mood on Tuesday, happy to put the traditionally scary month of October behind it with major market benchmarks still at or near record highs. Favorable readings on the U.S. economy were enough to overcome political uncertainty in Washington, and good earnings from many stalwart companies in the market helped to make investors more comfortable with the nearly straight-up trajectory that stocks have enjoyed lately. Yet some companies suffered from less-pleasant news that held the their stocks back from partaking in the good cheer. Qualcomm (NASDAQ: QCOM), Shopify (NYSE: SHOP), and Mylan (NASDAQ: MYL) were among the worst performers on the day. Below, we'll look more closely at these stocks to tell you why they did so poorly.

Qualcomm sank 7% after reports surfaced that major customer Apple was considering changing suppliers for the modems in future iPhone models. The two companies have wrangled in litigation over the exclusivity that Qualcomm has negotiated, with the iPhone maker saying that competing chips would have been much cheaper to use if it could have made a switch previously. Qualcomm gets a substantial portion of its business from the iDevice pioneer, and investors now fear that a shift to a different modem supplier is actually feasible. It's too early to tell whether such a move will happen, but the impact would be large enough that the concern is justified.

Image source: Qualcomm.

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Source: Fool.com