U.S. stocks slumped Thursday in the financial markets’ biggest meltdown so far this year, with tech companies taking a harder hit than the media sector in a dramatic reversal of the previous day’s rally.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average shed 1,063.09 points, down 3.1% for the day. The tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite index cratered 5%, down 647 points, marking one of its biggest one-day declines since the outset of the pandemic in March 2020.
The market volatility came after the Federal Reserve on Wednesday OK’d a half-percentage-point increase in the interest rate in an attempt to slow the rate of inflation. That news pushed stocks higher, only to have those gains wiped out by Thursday’s pullback.
Overall, big tech fared worse than media companies in Thursday’s major sell-off. Netflix, already suffering huge drops in market value this year after missing subscriber estimates, sank 7.7%, dropping to a new four-year low of $188.32/share. Streaming platform company Roku saw its stock fall 6.9%, to $102.45/share.
Tech losers on the day included Snap (-9.6%), Amazon (-7.6%), Meta (-6.8%), Apple (-5.6%) and Alphabet (-4.8%). Shares of Redbox, the DVD rental kiosk and streaming company, plunged 18.7%.
Among media stocks, Warner Bros. Discovery fell 4%, Disney and Comcast (which owns NBCUniversal) both skittered down 3%, Fox Corp. was off 1.9% (Class B shares), and Paramount declined 1.5%.
Amid the carnage, one outlier was Twitter, whose shares closed up 2.8%, to $50.41/share, after Elon Musk said he had secured an additional $7.1 billion in equity financing to execute his $44 billion takeover of the company. That is still 7% lower than Musk’s $54.20/share bid.
From Variety US
