stock index futures slumped on Thursday as Facebook-owner Meta Platforms' dour forecast jolted the broader tech sector and threatened to upend a nascent recovery in stock markets.
Meta shares tumbled 22.1% in premarket trading and were set for their biggest single-day decline ever, as the company blamed Apple's privacy changes and increased competition from rivals such as TikTok for its disappointing outlook.
Nasdaq futures were down 2% as shares of other social media companies also took a beating.
Twitter Inc and Pinterest Inc fell about 7%, while Snapchat lost 15%.
Meta's tumble weighed on other Big Tech stocks as well. Alphabet Inc, Microsoft Corp and Apple Inc fell about 1% each, while Amazon.com Inc, scheduled to report results later in the day, declined 3.4%.
"This is definitely shaking investors' resolve around the recent relief rally that we've been seeing in tech," said Robert Pavlik, chief investment strategist at SlateStone Wealth LLC in New York.
"There's also a bigger problem going on, and that is higher interest rates and inflation. This is sort of shaking out the weak hands that have been around trying to ride this bounce that's been going on in tech."
The "FAANG" group of Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix Inc and Google's Alphabet has seen around $400 billion in market capitalization wiped off in the opening weeks of 2022 as investors dodged richly valued stocks with aggressive rate hikes on deck.
At 7:46 a.m.
ET, Dow e-minis were down 46 points, or 0.13%, S&P 500 e-minis were down 42 points, or 0.92%, and Nasdaq 100 e-minis were down 305 points, or 2.02%.
The CBOE volatility index, Wall Street's fear gauge, ticked up 0.70 points to 22.77 after hitting a near three-week low in the previous session.
Nearly half of the S&P 500 companies have reported results so far during this earnings season, and 77.1% of them have beaten analysts' earnings estimates, printable diary pages 2023 compared with an average of 84% over the past four quarters, according to Refinitiv data.
Investors will be keeping an eye out for jobless claims data at 8:30 a.m.
ET, where the number of Americans filing new claims for unemployment benefits is expected to decrease to 245,000 for the week ended Jan. 29, from 260,000 in the previous week.
ISM data, also due later in the day, is likely to show a dip in service sector activity in January.
(Reporting by Bansari Mayur Kamdar and Medha Singh in Bengaluru; Additional reporting by John McCrank; Editing by Shounak Dasgupta and Saumyadeb Chakrabarty)
US STOCKS-Wall St futures tumble after Facebook sparks another tech...
por Bennett Hetrick (2022-05-04)
By Bansari Mayur Kamdar and Medha Singh
Feb 3 (Reuters) - U.S.
stock index futures slumped on Thursday as Facebook-owner Meta Platforms' dour forecast jolted the broader tech sector and threatened to upend a nascent recovery in stock markets.
Meta shares tumbled 22.1% in premarket trading and were set for their biggest single-day decline ever, as the company blamed Apple's privacy changes and increased competition from rivals such as TikTok for its disappointing outlook.
Nasdaq futures were down 2% as shares of other social media companies also took a beating.
Twitter Inc and Pinterest Inc fell about 7%, while Snapchat lost 15%.
Meta's tumble weighed on other Big Tech stocks as well. Alphabet Inc, Microsoft Corp and Apple Inc fell about 1% each, while Amazon.com Inc, scheduled to report results later in the day, declined 3.4%.
"This is definitely shaking investors' resolve around the recent relief rally that we've been seeing in tech," said Robert Pavlik, chief investment strategist at SlateStone Wealth LLC in New York.
"There's also a bigger problem going on, and that is higher interest rates and inflation. This is sort of shaking out the weak hands that have been around trying to ride this bounce that's been going on in tech."
The "FAANG" group of Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix Inc and Google's Alphabet has seen around $400 billion in market capitalization wiped off in the opening weeks of 2022 as investors dodged richly valued stocks with aggressive rate hikes on deck.
At 7:46 a.m.
ET, Dow e-minis were down 46 points, or 0.13%, S&P 500 e-minis were down 42 points, or 0.92%, and Nasdaq 100 e-minis were down 305 points, or 2.02%.
The CBOE volatility index, Wall Street's fear gauge, ticked up 0.70 points to 22.77 after hitting a near three-week low in the previous session.
Nearly half of the S&P 500 companies have reported results so far during this earnings season, and 77.1% of them have beaten analysts' earnings estimates, printable diary pages 2023 compared with an average of 84% over the past four quarters, according to Refinitiv data.
Investors will be keeping an eye out for jobless claims data at 8:30 a.m.
ET, where the number of Americans filing new claims for unemployment benefits is expected to decrease to 245,000 for the week ended Jan. 29, from 260,000 in the previous week.
ISM data, also due later in the day, is likely to show a dip in service sector activity in January.
(Reporting by Bansari Mayur Kamdar and Medha Singh in Bengaluru; Additional reporting by John McCrank; Editing by Shounak Dasgupta and Saumyadeb Chakrabarty)