shares of bed bath  beyond inc slumped toward a thirdstraight loss on thursday after raymond james analyst bobby griffin turned bearish after the home goods retailer’s strategic update citing “abysmal” underlying business trends and while griffin said the 500 million in new financing bed bath announced will improve the company’s liquidity position it likely only “kicks the can down the road” the stock bbby  which has been swept up in the “meme stock” phenomenon dropped 68 in morning trading after plunging 213 on wednesday the stock has lost 335 amid a threeday losing streak griffin cut his rating to underperform after being at market perform since january 2021 that makes griffin the 13th analyst of the 18 surveyed by factset who have the equivalent of a sell rating on the stock there’s one analyst who is bullish while the other four are neutral basham’s downgrade comes after the company updated investors with its plan to boost liquidity and sales including the announcement of new financing and plans for a stock offering as well as plans to increase its national brands inventory while exiting some owned brands and to keep its buybuy baby business “while we haven’t recommended purchases of bbby in a long time…we find it challenging to even maintain our neutral rating given the current trends of the business and ongoing cash burn” griffin wrote in a note to clients “yes the new financing will improve the company’s liquidity position…but likely only ‘kicks the can down the road’ as underlying business trends remain abysmal with comparable sales down 26 yearoveryear no signs of improvement and a sizable cash burn 325m in free cash flow burn in fq2” he expressed concern that the ongoing cash burn will limit what the company can invest in its stores which will hamper its plans to improve the customer experience in addition he finds it difficult to see a path toward improved performance even with the company’s move back to focusing on more branded products due to the recent slowing of discretionary spending by consumers and the slowdown in the housing market wedbush’s seth basham reiterated his underperform rating on bed bath’s stock saying that while the new financing and stockoffering plan decreases shortterm liquidity risk and buys the company more time to deal with bloated inventories he still expects several more “noisy” quarters and sees “formidable” challenges in regaining traction with lost customers “even with more headroom to realize its vision now that liquidity prospects are improved new leadership needs to execute flawlessly on a strategy that still may not resonate while navigating significant balance sheet challenges in our view” basham wrote after notching in august the secondbest month in bed bath  beyond’s 30year public history the stock was still down 391 year to date while the spdr consumer discretionary select sector exchangetraded fund xly has dropped 245 and the sp 500 index spx has lost 178