The Day Tech Stocks Tanked
A handful of heavyweight tech names drove the S&P 500 for months and produced a very crowded trade. On Friday, it may have come to an end.
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Politics, schmolitics. The much-hyped events of last Thursday—former Federal Bureau of Investigation chief James Comey’s congressional testimony, the British election—turned out to be duds from the markets’ standpoint. The fireworks came on Friday, after a number of high-profile stock seers called time out, if not the end, on the mighty advance in the equity market, in particular the megacap technology stocks that have led the
Nasdaqand most of the major averages to records.
The so-called FAANG stocks—
Facebook(ticker: FB),
Amazon.com(AMZN),
Netflix(NFLX), and Google parent
Alphabet(GOOGL)—with the second A added with the inclusion of
Apple(AAPL)—had accounted for over two-fifths of the Standard & Poor’s 500 index’s gain in market value this year, The Wall Street Journal noted in a page-one piece on Friday. While pointing out that the rush into these big tech names was the most crowded trade anywhere, one money manager opined that it wasn’t about to end anytime soon.
Famous last words. Robert Boroujerdi, head of global securities research at Goldman Sachs, issued a report on Friday warning that the big tech stocks—including
Microsoft(MSFT), which he added to make it FAAMG—had become way too crowded a trade. (The market caps of Netflix and
Nvidia[NVDA] are too small to influence the cap-weighted S&P 500, he wrote.) The surge in FAAMG made for exalted valuations that recalled the Nifty 50 of the early 1970s or the dot-com era of 1999-2000, lifting them to lofty perches whence they could take a nasty spill.
http://www.barrons.com/articles/the-day-tech-stocks-tanked-1497070762