Stock market news: Wall Street tumbles as tech gets slammed

Spencer Platt/Getty Images

US stocks tumbled Friday as a
technology rout rattled markets around the world, days after
concerns about rising rates and the prospect of slowing global
economic growth had
wiped out Wall Street’s gains for the year. 

The Dow Jones
Industrial Average fell about 1%, or more than 200 points.
The Nasdaq
Composite shed 2.2%, and the S&P
500 was down 1.4%. 

High-flying technology companies
were taking the biggest hits after posting disappointing
earnings. Amazon
shares fell into a bear market, or down more than 20% from their
peak, after reporting revenue that fell short of expectations and
lowering its fourth-quarter guidance. Google parent company
Alphabet beat
on the bottom line, but missed on revenue. Snap hit
an all-time low after the company said it lost 2 million daily
users.

“While a lot of the recent sell-off (and headlines) have been
dominated by tech, the sell-off has been very broad-based in
nature,” Scott Buchta, head of fixed income strategy at Brean
Capital, wrote in an email.

“Although this morning’s GDP report may help bring some near-term
calm to the markets, we expect to see intraday volatility remain
elevated due to the technical nature of the markets (driven
largely by algos).”

Before the open, the Commerce
Department said

the US economy grew

in July through September at a
slightly slower pace than a blockbuster expansion earlier in the
year, marking the best back-to-back quarters since 2014. With
strong consumer spending offsetting weaker investment and
exports, gross domestic product rose at a seasonally adjusted
3.5% in the third-quarter.

“In one line: Strong GDP growth
hides soft capex and massive trade deterioration,” said Ian
Shepherdson, chief economist at Pantheon Macroeconomics.

Investors moved to the relative
safety of US government bonds, which move inversely to yields,
with the 10-year falling 4.7 basis points to 3.089%, its lowest
in three weeks. Meanwhile, the


dollar

climbed to its
highest levels since 2017 against a basket of peers. The


Chinese yuan

fell to
6.9641 against the greenback, flirting with its weakest point in
nearly a decade.