On Thursday, meta, a technology giant that owns Facebook, plunged 26% after its earnings were less than expected, and its market value plunged more than $237 billion, the largest one-day decline in U.S. stock history.
Meta's one-day decline exceeded Apple's record of $182 billion in September 2020 and Microsoft's $178 billion in March 2020.
Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook and CEO of meta, holds about 12.8% of the company. Zuckerberg's personal wealth shrank by $29 billion to $85 billion on Thursday. He also fell to 12th place in the Forbes real-time billionaire list, behind Indian business tycoons Mukesh Ambani and Gautam Adani.
"Meta and other companies surprised the market by reducing their profit prospects." French Industrial Bank Co.Ltd(601166) strategist Kenneth Broux said in an investor report. It also reminds people of the memory of the collapse of the technology bubble in 2000.
At the end of last year, Zuckerberg sold $4.47 billion worth of meta shares as part of a pre-set 10b5-1 trading plan, eliminating concerns about executive insider trading.
At the beginning of this year, American technology stocks suffered a heavy blow, the wealth of American technology tycoons suffered heavy losses, and the pattern of Forbes rich list was reshaped. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, who originally ranked second, was overtaken by Bernard Arnault, head of the French luxury giant LVMH group, and now ranks third.
However, Bezos's wealth increased by $20 billion to $177 billion after Amazon announced huge earnings on Thursday, an increase of 57% over the same period last year. Bezos owns about 9.9% of Amazon's stock.
At present, Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla, who ranks first in the Forbes rich list, has a net wealth of $241.4 billion. Musk's wealth once shrank to $35 billion in one day in November last year.
Last year, there was an unprecedented boom in U.S. technology stocks, pushing up the market value of technology giants. At present, the market value of apple and Microsoft is more than $2 trillion, and the market value of Google is close to $2 trillion. However, the expectation of recent high inflation and rising interest rates affected investor sentiment, resulting in sharp fluctuations in technology stock trading. Organic said that the situation of losing tens of billions of dollars a day in transactions is becoming normal.
Investors worry that after years of ultra-low interest rates, the Fed's tightening policy will weaken the overvalued value of the industry. The NASDAQ index, dominated by technology stocks and other high growth stocks, fell nearly 10% in January, the largest monthly decline since the covid-19 outbreak in March 2020.
"We can only hope that the stock price will gradually repair." Deng Zhijian, investment strategy director of DBS Bank, told the first financial reporter. He believes that on the whole, the profit growth of technology companies in the fourth quarter will not be particularly high, because the low base effect has declined; Secondly, the continuous strengthening of antitrust supervision has also hit the confidence of the capital market.
However, he believes that short-term negative factors are difficult to prevent investors from being optimistic about the technology industry for a long time. "Technology stocks are still the most important industry sector, especially semiconductors, cloud computing, data centers and application software in the upstream of science and technology." Deng Zhijian told the first financial reporter, "even if we enter the interest rate increase channel, technology stocks are also the industry with the largest average increase in the interest rate increase cycle in history, up to 40%."
Due to the limited funds in the future, investors will choose high-quality enterprises with real stable profit growth. "High quality enterprises and head enterprises will still attract a lot of funds." Deng Zhijian told the first financial reporter.
According to the data of research company Vanda, at the end of 2020 and the beginning of 2021, the purchase of retail investors mainly focused on high growth stocks such as expensive technology and electric vehicles. But over the past week, purchases of large technology stocks have soared and there has been little demand for speculative assets.
