"If I start crying, it's not because of today's news (Meta's stock price plummeting), it's just because my cornea accidentally got scratched..."
On Thursday (Feb. 3), Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of the rarely bespectacled and red-eyed Meta Platforms, tried to explain the change in his image at the time in a joking remark at an online meeting within the company.
Not long before the meeting, Meta had just suffered an "unprecedented" plunge in the history of U.S. stocks — the opening price of the day fell by more than 25%, and finally closed down 26.44% at $237.60 throughout the day, the biggest decline in the stock's history. In terms of market capitalization, Meta's market value evaporated by about $251.3 billion in a single day, the largest single-day market value decline in the history of the US stock market.
Meta's epic overnight dive may even directly lead Zuckerberg to finally fall out of the top ten of the world's richest list. Zuckerberg owns about 12.8 percent of the tech giant, formerly Facebook.
According to real-time data from the Bloomberg billionaire Index, Thursday's plunge has cost Zuckerberg nearly $31 billion in wealth, and Zuckerberg is now worth about $89.6 billion, just the tenth place on the rich list.
On another Forbes list of the richest people in real time, Zuckerberg's ranking has fallen to 12th, surpassed by two Indian business tycoons, Mukesh Ambani and Gautam Adani...
Wall Street has downgraded its Meta ratings The U.S. tech giants have been hit hard by their involvement
According to Meta's latest earnings report released on Wednesday, the social media giant announced a more-than-expected decline in profits and a gloomy outlook, with investors deeply shocked by the sluggish performance in terms of performance.
Last quarter, Facebook's user growth stalled for the first time ever, with 1.93 billion daily active users seeing a month-on-month decline for the first time, and that's just one of a number of bad indicators of the company's dire earnings report, which has led many investors to suspect that the highlight of the stock is a thing of the past.
Meta's quarterly forecast also disappointed Wall Street, with revenue guidance of $27 billion to $29 billion, far below analysts' expectations of $30.15 billion. For the company, whichse share price has risen almost every year since its listing in 2012, stagnant user growth and a gloomy outlook mark a dramatic shift, raising concerns that Meta's flagship product and core ad-money-making machine are entering a bottleneck period after years of sustained growth.
Zuckerberg has publicly acknowledged at this week's earnings conference that Meta faces stiff competition in attracting user time and attention. In Thursday's latest internal online meeting, Zuckerberg tried to cheer up employees and encourage them to focus on video products. But zuckerberg once again said the social networking giant is facing "unprecedented competition" with the rise of short-form video platforms, echoing what he said to investors a day earlier, according to a panelist.
At present, a number of Wall Street analysts have successively downgraded their investment ratings for Meta. Among them, JPMorgan chase analyst Douglas Anmuth downgraded its rating from buy to neutral for the first time since Facebook officially went public in 2012.
In a note to investors, Anmuth and his team wrote that "the growth rate of Meta advertising revenue has slowed sharply, and the transition to the meta-universe business is costly, uncertain, and likely to last for years, so we adjusted our posture to a wait-and-see state, believing that the company's stock price will be under more pressure or range in the coming months." It is reported that Xiaomo analysts have now lowered the target price of Meta from $385 to $284.
Bank of Montreal (BMO) analyst Daniel Salmon also downgraded Meta's rating from "outperforming" to neutral and lowered its price target from $323 to $290.
"While there are still huge opportunities for Meta's business model, it seems unlikely that it will drive the stock price up significantly, as new competitive elements are likely to overwhelm these positives." Finally, given the massive investment in metacosmities, the prospect of combining the company's profit margins remains challenging," Salmon wrote in a note to investors.
Laura Hoy, an equity analyst at Hargreaves Lansdown, also said, "Meta CEO Zuckerberg may be keen to coax the world into another reality, but the disappointing fourth-quarter results quickly burst its metacosmic bubble." ”
It is worth mentioning that the disappointment with Meta's earnings and the subsequent plunge in its stock price even reminded many market participants of the bursting of the technology bubble in 2000.
Other social media stocks, including Twitter, Pinterest and Spotify, also took a hit on Thursday. In the first weeks of 2022, the "FAANG" portfolio of five technology stocks, consisting of Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix and Google parent company Alphabet, has lost about $400 billion in market capitalization. As central banks gradually scale back stimulus packages, lower-priced segments are starting to become more attractive.
Whether the US stock market can avoid the "tiger tail" of the Spring Festival holiday: all count on Amazon
For domestic investors who are still in the Spring Festival holiday, considering that the performance of the first day after the A-share festival will be affected by overseas markets to a certain extent, whether the sharp decline in US stocks led by The overnight Meta will continue on the last day of the Spring Festival holiday on Friday, it is obviously worth paying attention to at the moment - the NASDAQ Composite Index, which is dominated by technology stocks, fell 538.73 points on Thursday to 13878.82 points, a decline of 3.7%, breaking the rally for four consecutive days. Recorded the biggest one-day decline since September 2020. The Dow and S&P 500 also fell nearly 1.5% and 2.5% respectively on the day.
In fact, if you exclude last night's big fall, the performance of the US stock market in the first few trading days before the Spring Festival holiday of the Lunar New Year of the Tiger can not be described as strong, and it can even be called "tiger and tiger", but the sudden turn of the market on Thursday obviously still makes many people's nerves tense up again: Will the performance of the US stock market in the Spring Festival holiday week finally "tiger head and tail"?
Of course, at least for now, people may not have to be too pessimistic - before the official opening of the US stock market tonight, us stock bulls may be able to hope that a heavyweight "thigh" can offset the bearishness brought by Meta: Amazon!
The e-commerce giant's fourth-quarter earnings report after hours on Thursday beat expectations, with shares up 14 percent in after-hours trading.
According to Bloomberg, if the stock's after-hours performance can be maintained until Friday's close, its market value will increase by nearly $200 billion. This will set a record for the largest one-day market capitalization increase in the history of the US stock market. At the same time, it also indicates that in just two days, Amazon and Meta will create two historic record market value changes in succession.
According to data compiled by Bloomberg, Amazon's market capitalization gain of about $200 billion will exceed the market capitalization of more than 90% of companies in the S&P 500 index. In the U.S. stock market, the last record for market capitalization growth occurred last week, when Apple rose sharply the day after the release of its earnings report, and the one-day market value increase reached about $179 billion.
Amazon's latest earnings report after hours on Thursday showed that sales of its cloud computing business exceeded Wall Street expectations in the previous quarter, and the company raised the price of Amazon Prime membership subscriptions, alleviating concerns that its increased costs could hit profitability. These factors also masked Amazon's lower-than-expected sales and operating profit forecasts for the quarter.
Amazon noted that it will raise the annual fee for Prime membership services from $119 to $139, citing rising wages and transportation-related costs and continued expansion of membership benefits. The last time the company raised the cost of the project was in 2018. Members can enjoy Amazon's fast shipping services, video streaming, and other entertainment services.
Among the exchange-traded funds that track the NASDAQ 100 index, invesco QQQ Trust Series 1, the largest, rose more than 2 percent at one point in after-hours trading, market data showed. Amazon led the rally, which also drove several companies that have not yet announced their results higher after hours, including Etsy up 7.9 percent, DoorDash up 7.2 percent, Snowflake up 3.6 percent, and Airbnb up 3.0 percent.
As of press time, Nasdaq 100 futures were up about 2.17 percent during Friday's Asian session, while S&P 500 futures were up about 1.25 percent.