St. Jude Medical: S&P Intraday Laggard

NEW YORK (TheStreet) -- St. Jude Medical(STJ) was the worst-performing stock in the S&P 500 on Monday morning.

The S&P 500 was down 15.72 points, or 1.13%, to 1,382.35.

Shares of St. Jude declined 3.32% to $39.61. The medical technology company said on Friday it wanted a retraction of a piece called "Deaths Caused by the Failure of Riata and Riata ST Implantable Cardioverter-Defibrillator Leads" by Dr. Robert Hauser in the Heart Rhythm Journal.

The article compared the number of deaths related to St. Jude's Riata and Medtronic's(MDT) Quattro Secure; St. Jude claims the author of the article under-counted fatalities from Medtronic.

"The method of the study itself, using MAUDE reports to compare devices, is not appropriate," St. Jude said in a statement. "The home page of the Food and Drug Administration's MAUDE database even states, 'MAUDE data is not intended to be used either to evaluate rates of adverse events or to compare adverse event occurrence rates across devices.'"

St. Jude has an estimated price-to-earnings ratio for next year of 10.85 times; the average for medical equipment companies is 42.56. For comparison, Intuitive Surgical(ISRG) has a higher forward P/E of 32.23.

Seventeen of the 31 analysts who cover St. Jude rated it buy. Thirteen analysts gave the stock a hold rating and one rated it sell.