What Happened?
A number of stocks fell in the afternoon session after Bloomberg reported that Anthropic’s preliminary second-quarter revenue topped $11.5 billion.
CNBC reported earlier in August, that Salesforce and its peers “have been under pressure on the view that tools such as Anthropic’s Claude Code and OpenAI’s Codex could hollow out software bills.” The market reaction suggests Anthropic’s print was treated as evidence that the tools are generating real dollars, not just demos.
Software had already bounced since Microsoft’s July 22 results, according to Morningstar, which left the group exposed if that fear returned. Salesforce, expected to report earnings later in August, could show whether customers are still expanding applications, or shifting budget to AI assistants.
The stock market overreacts to news, and big price drops can present good opportunities to buy high-quality stocks.
Among others, the following stocks were impacted:
Zooming In On Health Catalyst (HCAT)
Health Catalyst’s shares are extremely volatile and have had 53 moves greater than 5% over the last year. In that context, today’s move indicates the market considers this news meaningful but not something that would fundamentally change its perception of the business.
The previous big move we wrote about was 10 days ago when the stock dropped 23.1% on the news that the company provided a weak third-quarter revenue forecast and lowered its full-year outlook, despite topping second-quarter revenue expectations.
For the upcoming third quarter, Health Catalyst expects revenue of $55.5 million, a sharp sequential decline from the $70.49 million reported for the second quarter, which itself was down 12.7% year over year. The company also reduced its full-year 2026 revenue guidance to $247.5 million at the midpoint, a 5.7% decrease from its previous forecast.
This bleak outlook overshadowed the second-quarter results, in which the company’s adjusted earnings per share met analysts’ estimates, signaling significant challenges ahead.
