Yesterday, growth stocks climbed in the face of signals from the Federal Reserve on Wednesday that interest rates increase were coming sooner–as soon as the end of 2022–than expected.
That seemed puzzling. May be, one line of thought (mine) had it, investors and traders decided that growth stocks would outrun any increase in interest rates that might take place in 2022 or 2023.
Today, we got the selling that many had expected yesterday. The Standard & Poor’s 500 closed down 1.31%. The Dow Jones Industrial Average, home to many of the re-opening and value stocks projected to do well in a post-vaccine recovery, fell harder with a decline of 1.57%. the small cap Russell 2000, which has been more volatility lately than the indexes for large cap stocks, finished off 2.12%.
But the NASDAQ Composite (up 0.87% yesterday) and the NASDAQ 100 (Up 1.29% yesterday) both joined the retreat today with the former down 0.92% at the close and the latter off 0.81%.
The big high growth technology stocks that powered those two indexes yesterday were down today with Amazon (AMZN) edging 0.07% lower, NVDIA (NVDA) down 0.22%, Apple (AAPL) off 1.12%, Microsoft (MSFT) lower by 0.72%, and Facebook (FB) losing 2.11%. I would point out that some of those losses are very small, much smaller than the losses for the indexes as a whole.
Other technology stocks, what I call the less familiar growth momentum stocks, were, however, higher. Adobe (ADBE) gained 2.56% at the close, Twilio (TWLO) picked up 1.91%, SunRun (RUN) gained 1.05%, CrowdStike (CRWD) rose 1.50%, and PayPal (PYPL) added 1.90%.
The big losses among technology stocks were in the chip sector where Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing (TSM) fell 2.76%, Applied Materials (AMAT) dropped 4.50%, and Skyworks Solutions (SWKS) lost 2.41%.
The CBOE S&P 500 Volatility Index (VIX) climbed 8.39% to 19.24 at the close. It had been higher at 19.77 at 10:45 a.m. New York time this morning.
