A sell-off in tech stocks drove another day of declines in the Dow Jones Industrial Average Monday, with shares of Amazon and Netflix dipping more than 5% for the day.
The Dow finished down 459 points, or about 1.9%. But other exchanges felt the pain too -- the tech-heavy NASDAQ was down 2.7%, giving back all of its gains for the year, while the S&P 500 declined 2.2% for the day.
The tech sector has been rocked by fears of increased regulatory scrutiny following Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica scandal and President Trump’s twitter storm criticizing Amazon and what he claims is its taking unfair advantage of the U.S. Postal Service. Facebook shares have fallen a collective 16% since March 16, just before stories surfaced that Cambridge Analytics has used personal data from more than 50 million Facebook users without their knowledge.
Facebook shares were down another 2.8% ($4.40 per share) on Monday to $155.39 each. But the bulk of the losses were weathered by Amazon, down 5.2% and Netflix, down 5.1% for the day. Google closed at $1,006.47 each, down $25.32 or 2.5% while Apple was priced at $166.68, down $1.10 per share or less than 1%.
Amazon finished April 2 at $1,371.99 (down 75.35 each) while Netflix was priced at $280.29 (down $15.06 each). According to The Wall Street Journal, FAANG stocks have lost about $324 billion in market cap since March 16.
Cable stocks were down, but it could have been worse. Charter Communications and Cable One fell hardest in the distribution sector, down 2.4% and 2.1%, respectively. Comcast closed at $33.52 per share, down 1.9% (65 cents) while Altice USA finished at $18.29 (down 19 cents or 1% per share) and WOW was down 1.5% (11 cents) to $7.04 per share. On the programming side, AMC Networks was down 2% ($1.04) to $50.66 each followed by The Walt Disney Co., which earlier today said it would launch its ESPN Plus direct to consumer offering on April 12, closing at $98.66 per share, down $1.78 or 1.8% each. Other stocks in the sector had slight gains – Time Warner Inc. closed at $94.80, up 22 cents (0.23%) and Discovery Inc. finished the day at $21.58, up 15 cents each or 0.7%.
