With the terms it placed on Cyprus, the eurozone has its template for future bailouts in place, and depositors in countries with their own shaky finances will be wary about bearing the brunt of the next crisis.

Some stocks had shaky weeks of their own, even though they’re unrelated to the global financial problems. Don’t to running over the cliff with them like a bunch of lemmings, as this could just be a temporary situation. So let’s first see whether they had good reason to fall, as panic-fueled routs can sometimes lead to excellent buying opportunities.

Falling off a cliff
Shares of iron ore miner Cliffs Natural Resources fell 14% earlier this week to levels it hasn’t seen since the recession, as analysts at Morgan Stanley and Credit Suisse drastically cut their price targets. Following the miner’s just-as-dramatic slashing of its dividend by 76%, the analysts at both investment houses cut the stock by more than 60% from their previous price target. Morgan Stanley dropped Cliffs’ shares to $14 a stub, and Credit Suisse took it down to $10.

On the bright side, Goldman Sachs raised its outlook from “sell” to “neutral,” but that was hardly enough to outweigh the pall hanging over the miner. In general, analysts expect its iron ore business to be cut in half in 2013 and its pricing power to come under tremendous pressure. Earlier this month, Cliffs announced that it was idling its Quebec iron ore pellet plant to meet the market‘s lower demand.

With the global steel industry wobbling despite expectations that Chinese production will increase 4% this year, Cliffs’ largest customer, ArcelorMittal , is melting down as well. The world’s largest steelmaker accounts for 17% of Cliffs’ total revenues and a third of its U.S. business and has seen its stock lose a quarter of its value in 2013.

Last fall, I believed that most of the risk had been priced into Cliffs’ own stock, but shares are down 58% since then and don’t seem to have reached bottom yet. While it amounts to a bit of closing the barn door after the cows have escaped, I’ll be closing out my outperform rating on Motley Fool CAPS.

Big pay day
Easy come, easy go, or so say investors in American Apparel , which saw their stock jump more than 12% the other day on no company-specific news and then give a good portion of it back for pretty much the same reason. There was, however, an article that appeared in the trade rag WWD that the retailer’s chairman and CEO was being richly rewarded this year with a pay increase from $800,000 to $2 million cash. While sales rose 6% in the most recent quarter, company losses narrowed only slightly.

The stock, however, has more than doubled since the start of the year and has nearly tripled from its 52-week low. After the stock wallowed in penny-stock status because of …read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at DailyFinance