By Eric J. Savitz
Pressured by fallout from disappointing retail earnings, the Nasdaq Composite tumbled 4.73% Wednesday. It's the second-worst day of the year for the tech-heavy index, which is now down 27% in 2022.
The Nasdaq fell 4.99% on May 5. Today's selloff is the fourth time this year that the Nasdaq has declined more than 4% in a day.
Even with today's sharp losses, the Nasdaq Composite remains slightly above its 2022 closing low of 11,364.24 touched on May 11.
The first quarter earnings period saw disappointing results from many online retailers, including Amazon.com (ticker: AMZN), Etsy $(ETSY)$, eBay $(EBAY)$ and Shopify $(SHOP)$, but this week's reports from Walmart $(WMT)$ and Target $(TGT)$ in particular have raised new concerns about the health of consumer spending, spurring further losses for e-commerce players.
In Wednesday's selloff, the web-based retail group suffered fell sharply, with Wayfair (W), Chewy $(CHWY)$, Overstock $(OSTK)$, and Groupon $(GRPN)$ all down more than 10% on the day. Other consumer-facing internet-based companies were also hit hard, with DoorDash $(DASH)$, Airbnb $(ABNB)$, and Lyft $(LYFT)$ down 8% and Uber $(UBER)$ down 7%,
The market also continued to flee high growth but pricey cloud-based software plays, like Okta $(OKTA)$, down 10%, Zscaler $(ZS)$, off 10%, Datadog (DDOG) down 7%, and Palo Alto Networks (PANW) 7% lower.
Pandemic era winners continued their yearlong slump, with losses of 6% or more late in the day for Amazon, Peloton $(PTON)$, Zoom Video Communications (ZM), Tesla $(TSLA)$ and Netflix $(NFLX)$.
The selloff even triggered losses in shares of companies with announced takeover deals, like Polycom (which HP Inc. is buying), Activision Blizzard (which agreed to be acquired by Microsoft) and Anaplan (which accepted a buyout bid from Thoma Bravo.)
Write to Eric J. Savitz at eric.savitz@barrons.com
$(END)$ Dow Jones Newswires
May 18, 2022 16:31 ET (20:31 GMT)
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