Google's corporate parent Alphabet posted its slowest quarterly revenue growth since 2020. Photo / AP
Google's corporate parent Alphabet posted its slowest quarterly revenue growth since 2020. Photo / AP
Opinion by Liam Dann
Liam Dann, Business Editor at Large for New Zealand’s Herald, works as a writer, columnist, radio commentator and as a presenter and producer of videos and podcasts.
Alphabet shares are now off 18 per cent this year - 21 per cent since their peak in November. That puts them - like the wider Nasdaq index - into Bear market territory.
But other high-profile tech stocks have already seen far greater falls.
Streaming service Netflix is off 67 per cent this year after it saw subscriber numbers fall.
Meta - owner of Facebook and Instagram - is off 44 per cent year to date. Video conferencing company Zoom is off 46 per cent.
The shockwaves of the tech sell-off are being felt around the world, in part because of their connection to managed funds - including local KiwiSaver accounts.
The local NZX50 was down around 1 per cent on Wednesday, taking its year to date losses to nearly 12 per cent.
Markets have been unwinding from pandemic highs as central banks around the world raise interest rates in an attempt to get on top of inflation.
Investors are starting to fear the impact of higher rates could push economies into recession with serious impacts on company earnings.
Big falls on Wall Street have investors worried. Photo / AP
"It's not the time for investors to be taking risks," said Craigs Investment Partners head of research Mark Lister.
"It's a time for being a bit cautious - being defensive and sticking to the safe and boring companies. Some of the high fliers are being re-priced down and that process has a bit of time to go."
People were coming around, belatedly, to the realisation that inflation is going to be stubbornly high and that central banks are going to have to raise interest rates quickly and more aggressively, he said.
"That's going to put the brakes on terms of economic growth and for company earnings. I think the volatility will be with us for a while."
"They are good businesses but they simply became overpriced and have had too much of a run-up," he said of the big US tech stocks.
Here's hoping we don't see falls rival the original tech wreck.
Twenty years ago the global economy was shaken by the bursting of the dot.com bubble.
The meltdown in overinflated internet stocks saw something like US$5 trillion wiped off the global stocks in the two-year slump.
At its trough on October 9, 2002, the NASDAQ-100 had dropped to 1114, down 78 per cent from its peak.
It's hard to say whether that's heartening in that we're nowhere near that level of collapse... or deeply worrying in sense of how far we could still have to go.
