A new look at tech markets this morning shows some of these big market movers may be clawing out of the wreckage after bad Facebook numbers brought cataclysm on Wall Street this week.
Facebook, though, is still significantly down, where chart history shows a drop of about 25% earlier in the week as Facebook revealed it lost a million daily active users over quarter four, missing revenue and EPS estimates.
Other tech companies are doing better. Amazon sunk about 7% this week, but ticked up a little bit today. Apple is only two points off of highs after rising 5% over the week. And Alphabet rocketed up around 10% Wednesday, although it has since lost about half of that through a slowly diminishing per-share price by press time.
Facebook, for its part, continues to deal with lots of negative press, including a recent $2 million fine by British regulators.
“Britain’s competition regulator said on Friday it had fined Facebook-owner Meta 1.5 million pounds over fresh issues regarding its purchase of Giphy, a sanction that the U.S. firm said it would accept,” writes an unnamed Reuters reporter today. “Britain’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has taken a tough line with major tech groups in recent years, investigating their dominance of markets such as digital advertising and seeking to block the Facebook-Giphy deal.”
As for the market’s red ink, some covering the downturn suggest some traders were already looking to offload tech before the Facebook numbers came out.
“Many investors started trimming holdings of tech stocks even before the earnings season kicked off as future earnings growth promised by the sector loses its appeal when central banks raise rates, increasing the immediate financial rewards of holding risk-free government bonds,” writes Julien Ponthus at Reuters.
There’s also the specter of action by the Federal Reserve, where changes to low interest rate policy could hit equities hard.
Stay tuned
