Shares continue their slide amid broader tech rout
Apple Inc. shares continued their sharp slide in Friday trading and have entered correction territory.
The stock AAPL, +0.06% fell 4.7% midday Friday, and has dropped about 14% from its Sept. 1 record close of $134.18. A correction is defined as a decline of between 10% and 20% from a recent high, and Apple shares would need to close at or below $107.34 to enter bear-market territory, defined as a plunge of at least 20%.
Read: Tech bloodbath aside, ride these two giants for the second half of the recovery, veteran analyst says
Apple’s recent stock slide has pushed the smartphone giant below the $2 trillion market-capitalization threshold. The company now is on track to close with a valuation of $1.97 trillion based on intraday trading. Apple became the first U.S. company to close with a market value above $2 trillion on Aug. 20 and its market value reached a peak of $2.29 trillion based on the Sept. 1 closing high.
The iPhone maker completed a four-for-one split of its stock after last Friday’s close in an attempt to make the shares more broadly accessible and to bring its stock price, which hovered near $500 before the split, more in line with what’s typically seen for other members of the price-weighted Dow Jones Industrial Average DJIA, -0.56%, of which Apple is a component.
Apple shares have been punished over the past couple of days amid a broader rout of technology shares that had seen big run ups over the past few months. The tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite Index COMP, -1.26% dropped 460 points, or 4%, in Friday’s session after dropping 598 points, or 5%, in Thursday trading.
Wedbush analyst Daniel Ives wrote late Thursday that the “massive sell off will cause some white knuckles on the Street as fears of a tech bubble and stretched valuations become the talk of the town,” though he sees further room to run for tech names and called out Apple in particular as a company that could benefit from an economic rebound.
Hopes for that rebound got a boost Friday, after the government’s August jobs report, which showed the unemployment falling for a fourth-straight month. Read more about the jobs report.
Apple “remains our top 5G play and consumer tech recovery name as the lockdown eases and consumer spending looks to spike” in the second half of the year, Ives wrote.
The stock has added 42% over the past three months as the Dow Jones Industrial Average has advanced 5.8%