The Faangs are dead; long live the Faangs. The latest earnings season from the US technology kings — Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix and Alphabet’s Google — has been an uncharacteristic rollercoaster ride. Varying outlooks have been met by sharply contrasting market reactions. Share price falls after disappointments from Netflix, Facebook and the smaller Twitter, have left the broader Fang+ index of technology companies down almost 10 per cent from its June high, despite strong results from Apple.
For the wider market and economy, this is a big deal. The Faangs account for about one-eighth of the S&P 500 index’s total value but, says Bespoke Investment, they have provided half the market’s growth this year. Buying into them has been the most popular trade among money managers for months — forcing passive funds to do likewise as their weighting in the index has increased. Some funds are rueing tech punts they chose or had to take.
This reliance on one narrow segment for so much of the market’s growth is unhealthy; tech’s share of the wider index is now the highest since the dotcom boom. But that era featured too many flimsy companies with no profits reaching wildly inflated valuations based on hope and hot air. Today’s tech leaders have viable models and real earnings. Even Netflix, by far the smallest Faang, made net income of $1bn from revenues approaching $14bn in the past four quarters.