TOPLINE
Apple and Nvidia stocks tanked for the second consecutive trading session Thursday, a rare down stretch for the Silicon Valley titans this year fueled by concerns about each of their explosive sales.
KEY FACTS
Apple shares slipped 3.4% by 2:25 p.m. Eastern time after Bloomberg reported China is considering banning iPhone usage among some government workers and employees at state-owned corporations, casting doubt on Apple’s strength in the country which accounts for roughly a fifth of its sales.
The slide comes a day after Apple shed 3.6% – its 6.9% dip since Tuesday marks the steepest two-day loss for the world’s most valuable company since November.
Nvidia shares also dropped about 3% Thursday, bringing its two-day loss to 5.5% as the S&P 500’s best-performer of 2023 suffered a rare tumble.
The artificial intelligence leader’s stock slump came as a dubious conspiracy theory proliferated on X, the social media site formerly known as Twitter, suggesting that Nvidia has artificially inflated revenue in its AI segment by lying about its sales to CoreWeave, a Nvidia-backed cloud computing startup reportedly valued at about $8 billion.
That theory is “nonsense,” Bernstein analyst Stacy Rasgon wrote in a Thursday note to clients he “very grudgingly” sent out, encouraging investors to not get “your investment thesis from Twitter randos.”
BIG NUMBER
$250 billion. That’s how much market capitalization Apple and Nvidia shed over the last two days.
KEY BACKGROUND
Apple and Nvidia are two of the seven tech stocks accounting for a large majority of major stock indexes’ gains this year, leading to lingering questions about the depth of the strong market (Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft and Tesla round out the super seven). Both Apple and Nvidia set all-time high share prices this year, but on far different trajectories. Apple rode a steady 42% gain this year, just ahead with the tech-heavy Nasdaq’s 32% rise, thanks to solid 5% and 6% earnings beats during the first and second quarters, respectively, while Nvidia more than tripled in share price due to exploding expectations about its AI business, which grew by 141% just last quarter.
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CRUCIAL QUOTE
“The Nasdaq is sinking as one bad Apple spoils a bunch of mega-cap tech stocks,” Oanda analyst Edward Moya wrote Thursday. The index is down 2% over the last two days, steeper than the S&P 500’s 1% loss.