What Happened?
A number of stocks fell in the afternoon session after Anthropic announced that its Claude AI assistant can now control computers to complete tasks by imitating human keystrokes and mouse movements. Investors reacted to the possibility that enterprise value would migrate from the application layer to the intelligence layer, leaving legacy software providers vulnerable to displacement by autonomous agents that can operate across platforms. Analysts added that the "agentic era" could lead to massive margin compression as software companies lose their pricing power.
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:
- Data Analytics company Health Catalyst (NASDAQ: HCAT) fell 8.6%. Is now the time to buy Health Catalyst? Access our full analysis report here, it’s free.
- HR Software company Asure Software (NASDAQ: ASUR) fell 6.4%. Is now the time to buy Asure Software? Access our full analysis report here, it’s free.
- Developer Operations company GitLab (NASDAQ: GTLB) fell 6.3%. Is now the time to buy GitLab? Access our full analysis report here, it’s free.
- Advertising Software company Zeta Global (NYSE: ZETA) fell 7.9%. Is now the time to buy Zeta Global? Access our full analysis report here, it’s free.
- Automation Software company SoundHound AI (NASDAQ: SOUN) fell 6.7%. Is now the time to buy SoundHound AI? Access our full analysis report here, it’s free.
Zooming In On Health Catalyst (HCAT)
Health Catalyst’s shares are extremely volatile and have had 48 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 6 days ago when the stock dropped 4.2% on the news that Wells Fargo downgraded the company's stock to Equal Weight from Overweight and significantly cut its price target. The firm lowered its price target to $1.00 from $5.00, citing concerns about structural issues that may continue even after the company's replatforming efforts. The bank noted that Health Catalyst had missed expectations for both client retention and growth. This action followed the company's recent financial report for the fourth quarter of 2025, which presented mixed results. While revenue surpassed expectations, earnings per share of $0.08 fell short of forecasts. Furthermore, the company provided a weak revenue outlook for the first quarter of 2026, projecting a decline.
Health Catalyst is down 52% since the beginning of the year, and at $1.10 per share, it is trading 76.2% below its 52-week high of $4.60 from March 2025. Investors who bought $1,000 worth of Health Catalyst’s shares 5 years ago would now be looking at only $22.99.
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