According to the Wall Street Journal, the S&P 500’s information-technology sector has dropped 20% in 2022, its worst start to a year since 2002. Its gap with the broader S&P 500, down 14%, is the largest since 2004. Some investors, haunted by the 2000 dot-com bust, are bracing for bigger losses ahead. The declines have prompted investors to pull a record $7.6 billion out of technology-focused mutual funds and exchange-traded funds this year through April.
For years, shares of tech companies propelled the stock market higher, pushing major indexes to dozens of records. Excitement for everything from cloud computing to software and social media drove an epic runup in far-reaching corners of the market. More recently, the Federal Reserve’s accommodative policies at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic fueled a seemingly insatiable appetite for risky bets.
The S&P 500 Value index outperforms the S&P 500 Growth index—including companies such as Tesla Inc., Nvidia Corp., and Meta Platforms Inc. —by 17 percentage points, its widest margin since 2000. Meanwhile, more than $48 billion has left funds tracking growth stocks, according to data provider EPFR, while investors have poured more than $13 billion into funds tracking value stocks.
