The news of Meta Platforms’ (FB) stock taking a beating after posting dreary quarterly earnings is making some investors seeking exposure to tech justifiably nervous. On Thursday morning, shares of the Facebook parent company dropped more than 25% to a 52-week low of $244.75. The nosedive occurred after its Wednesday Q4 earnings results revealed a miss on earnings per share, a dire outlook for Q1, and a loss of one million daily active Facebook users.
The drop is set to wipe out roughly $220 billion from Meta’s market capitalization, bringing it to about $681 billion. A report from Insider notes that the stock is facing the biggest single-day loss in U.S. corporate history, ahead of the 19% plummet Meta saw in July 2018.
In a call with analysts on Wednesday, Meta CFO David Wehner said that Apple’s (AAPL) iOS privacy changes, inflation, and exchange rates all combine to a hit of $10 billion. “We believe the impact of iOS overall is a headwind on our business in 2022,” Wehner said on the call. “It’s on the order of $10 billion, so it’s a pretty significant headwind for our business.”
In response to the market reaction to Meta’s earnings, Hargreaves Lansdown equity analyst Laura Hoy said: “Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg may be keen to coax the world into an alternate reality, but disappointing fourth quarter results were quick to burst his metaverse bubble.”
Investors looking to invest in technology without exposure to Meta may want to consider the Invesco NASDAQ Next Gen 100 ETF (QQQJ). QQQ seeks investment results that generally correspond to the price and yield performance of the NASDAQ-100 Index®. To maintain the correspondence between the composition and weights of the securities in the trust and the stocks in the NASDAQ-100 Index®, the adviser adjusts the securities from time to time to conform to periodic changes in the identity and/or relative weights of index securities.
QQQJ, meanwhile, tracks the Nasdaq Next Gen 100 Index, measuring the performance of the 100 largest companies that fall just outside the regular Nasdaq-100. And while QQQJ does give ETF investors exposure to big tech companies (other than Meta), it also has holdings in mid-cap companies that aren’t quite household names.
For more information, visit Invesco.
For more news, information, and strategy, visit the ETF Education Channel.