Watch out for US tech: Platinum
Platinum investment specialist, Julian McCormack, has expressed concerns about the future earnings of US technology stocks.
McCormack said Meta Platforms, formerly known as Facebook, was a 3.6% holding in the Platinum International Technology fund.
However, he felt, it had severely disappointed investors with its results as shares were down 61% since the start of the year to 21 October.
In an investment update, he said: “The stock that has most severely disappointed investors to date is Meta Platforms followed by Netflix in that group.
“Meanwhile, Google is an advertising business and interest rates are rising a lot. I would be thinking very seriously about how earnings are going to unfold for that business in the next couple of years.”
Google had seen share prices fall 30% year to date while Netflix was down 51% while the wider tech-heavy Nasdaq index was down 14%.
Alex Barbi, portfolio manager of the International Technology fund, said technology stocks had not been exempt from the Federal Reserve’s interest rate rises.
“Technology stocks were not exempt from market gyrations as investors reassessed valuations and prospects in light of the more aggressive monetary policies on the horizon.
“Software and cloud stocks were not immune to the negative tone of the market as investors remained sceptical about highly-valued names, with several high-profile companies signalling decelerating revenue growth”
McCormack added the market reaction to US dollar movements, which had risen strongly against the Australian dollar, had been unexpected in recent months.
“You would have expected quite a lot of concern about earnings for US companies, based just on the strength of the US dollar. There's some talk about that, but not a lot.
“So, the market reaction has been very different to what we would have seen in earlier times. I think this reaction partly reflects an aversion to business and geopolitical risk, but there's also recency bias at play here, where we remember what worked well before, so we go back to it.”
AUTHOR
Laura Dew
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