General Electric has been in free fall since Q2 2017. This is despite a roaring bull market in stocks last year.
I can summarize GE’s problem in two charts.
There operating cash flow has gone negative.
More importantly though, they have to much debt. When assets and liabilities get this close I get suspicious of accounting games being played to make it look like you are not buying a stock with negative equity. For instance ‘Goodwill assets’, ‘other long-term assets’, etc are high on their balance sheet. Digging deeper you could discover you are buying shares in a company with negative equity.
Amazingly, despite these deteriorating financials, the stock went side ways in 2016 all the way through the first quarter of 2017.