Tech Shares Go Down, Erasing S&P 500 Year Gain

The Nasdaq 100 Index reached its three days biggest retreat since 2011, while Standard & Poor’s 500 lost its year gain due to massive technology shares selloff in the past week.

Yesterday’s most spectacular losses are more than 3 percent for Pfizer Inc and American Express Co, 2.3 percent and 2.4 percent for homebuilders D.R. Horton and KB Home, and more than 1.6 percent for Yahoo! Inc. and Apple Inc.

S&P 500 dropped by 1.1 percent to 1,845.04, while Dow Jones Industrial Average decreased with 1 percent to 16,245.87. Nasdaq 100 gauge of the biggest technology stocks went down with 0.9 percent, accumulating a total three-day drop of 4.3 percent.

Experts like Ryan Detrick, senior technical strategist at Schaeffer’s Investment Research in Cincinnati, claim that things happened this way for quite some time now and small caps and tech have been in bad position for the whole past month.

The situation has brought concern to option traders, reminding them of the 4 years’ ago crash. There were more than 1 million options on an exchange-traded fund tracking the Nasdaq index, a record since May 7, 2010, a day with $862 billion abrupt loss for the value of U.S. stocks. The first quarter hasn’t been great for hedge funds that chose to invest mostly in technology, as Chinese Internet Company Baidu Inc. and online retailer Amazon.com fell 14 percent and, respectively, 15 percent.

Donald Selkin, chief market strategist at National Securities Corp in New York, notices the alternative investors are considering now “What’s more bizarre to me is the retro tech stocks, the Mad Men -- like we’re back in the 1960s - - are up. People are going into those old-timers, the retros, because of more reasonable valuations.”