Membership in the club known as the Four Horsemen of the Nasdaq seems like it is always changing. At one point in the 1990s, that club was comprised of Cisco (NasdaqGM: CSCO), Dell (NasdaqGM: DELL), Intel (NasdaqGM: INTC) and Microsoft (NasdaqGM: MSFT).
Then it was Oracle (NYSE: ORCL), Sun Microsystems, EMC (NYSE: EMC) and Cisco with some adding JDS Uniphase (NasdaqGM: JDSU) to the group as well.
A few years ago, it was Apple (NasdaqGM: AAPL), Google (NasdaqGM: GOOG), Amazon (NasdaqGM: AMZN) and, if one can believe it, BlackBerry (NasdaqGM: BBRY), the artist formerly known as Research in Motion.
These day the four horsemen are Facebook (NasdaqGM: FB), Netflix (NasdaqGM: NFLX), Tesla (NasdaqGM: TSLA) and NYSE-listed LinkedIn (NYSE: LNKD). Prior to Wednesday, the average year-to-date gain for that group was 210.2%. Facebook was the “laggard” with a 2013 gain of 88.1%. Elon Musk’s Tesla was the lead having risen nearly fivefold.
The party for the four horsemen may be drawing to close, at least temporarily, as a rising number of market participants question the lofty valuations associated with these names. Over the past week, Tesla has plunged 10.5%. Netflix is lucky to be modestly higher after Tuesday’s sell-off. [Curtain Could Fall on Social Media ETF Party]
When it comes to the ensuing impact sustained retrenchment in these story stocks could have on various ETFs, interestingly, Netflix is least problematic. Although CEO Reed Hastings questioned the price of his own stock and Carl Icahn has slashed his stake in the company, Netflix is not a tail wagging the dog of many ETFs. As of Tuesday, it was hard to find an ETF that even had a 4.5% weight to Netflix. [ETFs for Netflix Earnings]
However, as Risk Reversal notes, charts for Tesla and LinkedIn, do not look so hot at the moment, and that is not good news for several ETFs with decent allocations to the stocks.