Nasdaq's Worst Day in Nearly 4 Months as Yield Spike Triggers Tech Slump

The tech-heavy Nasdaq suffered its worst day in nearly four months Thursday, as a sharp spike in U.S. government bond yields on inflation fears exacerbated fears about high-valued growth sectors and triggered selling across tech.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 1.76%, or 561 points. The S&P 500 was down 2.43%, while the Nasdaq Composite fell 3.52%.

Technology fell 3%, resuming its recent slump after reprieve a day earlier, as the United States 10-Year jumped to a more than one-year high briefly topping 1.6%. Fears about rising inflation muddied the outlook for high-flying growth stocks. But with real rates, which takes into account inflation, still “negative,” the overall environment for equities remains supportive, BlackRock (NYSE:BLK)'s Chief Investment Officer of Global Fixed Income, Rick Rieder told CNBC in an interview earlier Thursday.

Investors in growth stocks like tech, with high valuations, usually have to wait longer to recoup their investments, which is unattractive in an inflationary environment, where money today, is worth more than money in the future.

Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL), Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT), Amazon.com (NASDAQ:AMZN), Facebook (NASDAQ:FB) and Alphabet (NASDAQ:GOOGL) were sharply lower.

Twitter, however, traded against the trend, rising 4% after the social media company set out plans to boost monetizable daily active users to 315 million by 2023 and double revenue in that year.

In a further sign that high-growth stocks have lost their shine, stay-at-home market darlings like Zoom Video Communications (NASDAQ:ZM), Peloton Interactive (NASDAQ:PTON) and DocuSign (NASDAQ:DOCU) were nursing heavy losses, down more than 5% each.

The sharp pace of the uptick in rates has also sparked a jolt of volatility, pointing to underlying investor uncertainty, exacerbated by a renewed short-squeeze in shares of GameStop (NYSE:GME), which ended the session up 19%. The CBOE Volatility Index index, or VIX, jumped 35%.

Consumer stocks were also deeply in the red on disappointing quarterly results, with Best Buy (NYSE:BBY) and Dominos Pizza (NYSE:DPZ) down 9% and 7%, respectively.

Cyclicals like energy, financials and industrials, which tend to move in tandem with an improving economy, were not sparred as recent took some parts of the sector into overbought territory.

On the economic front, initial jobless claims dropped by a more than expected 111,000, to 730,000, while the U.S. fourth-quarter GDP was revised slightly higher to 4.1% from 4%.

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