WhyItDropped

Nasdaq · May 18, 2022

The day inflation started eating profits

-4.73%

single-day change vs previous close

Part of a longer stretch

The 2021–22 tech bear market

midway through · 2021-11-19 → 2022-12-28, -36.40% over the whole period

What happened that day?

  • On 18 May 2022 the Nasdaq fell 4.73%
  • It was the day the cost blowout showed up in large US retailers' results
  • There is a reason retail news hit technology harder
  • When consumers close their wallets, advertising budgets are cut first — and much of big tech lives on advertising
  • Online retail carried the same cost problem. Warehouses and delivery are costs for a technology company too
  • This day made clear that inflation presses on share prices through earnings, not only through rates
  • In this stretch the index was 27.18% below its peak

Sources

Every figure on this page is recomputed from the original daily closing prices and checked against them at build time. The account of what happened is written from the sources listed above.