Retail investors have been shunning most of Big Tech this past week, according to JPMorgan. Strategists at the bank led by Peng Cheng said retail investors dumped $130 million worth of Meta stock, sold $122 million of Amazon and $112 million of Apple. There was one notable exception: Alphabet. Cheng, JPMorgan’s head of big data and artificial intelligence strategies, said the Google parent’s stock saw a $137 million boost from retail investors. He also said Alphabet was “the most popular name” this past week. The tech sector has taken a beating this year amid high inflation and rising interest rates. On Wednesday, tech stocks were among the worst performers after the Federal Reserve announced another 0.75 percentage point interest rate hike and indicated the tightening was far from done. The tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite is down more than 30% year to date, while Facebook parent Meta is off more than 70%, Amazon is down 45% and Apple has fallen 20%. Just last week Alphabet had its worst day since March 2020, losing 9% on Oct. 26 after it reported weaker-than-expected earnings and revenue for the third quarter. Its stock is off about 40% year to date. Overall, retail traders bought $2.2 billion in stocks and funds this past week, the second consecutive week of positive inflow, Cheng said. Demand was strongest in large-cap U.S. equity ETFs and S & P 500 ETFs. — CNBC’s Michael Bloom contributed reporting.
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