After rising since March, Big Tech stocks dropped in September, with Facebook down 10.7% on August, Apple down 10.25%, Google down 10.1%, and Amazon down 8.8%
Context & Ripple Effects
This September pullback is the first real test of the trade that defined mid-2020: after the group lost a combined $1.3T from the Feb. 19 peak in the March crash, Big Tech led the entire market recovery — which is exactly why a month of double-digit declines in Facebook, Apple, Google, and Amazon matters more than the same move would in smaller names.
The drawdown also set a template. A year later, Bloomberg framed the September 2021 tech selloff as 'similar to Sept. 2020's slump,' with the same five names shedding $500B+ — evidence that these concentrated mega-cap drops had become a recurring market event rather than a one-off.
First-order effects
- Investors who rode the March-to-August rally gave back a large slice of it in weeks: Facebook fell 10.7%, Apple 10.25%, Google 10.1%, and Amazon 8.8%, hitting the Nasdaq hardest because of its mega-cap weighting.
Second-order effects
- A synchronized drop across all four names pressures fund managers concentrated in the same handful of stocks to trim positions together, amplifying volatility — the dynamic that reappeared when the 2022 Big Tech selloff pushed the Nasdaq to its steepest drop since June 2020.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, Big Tech's correlation becomes the market's systemic risk: the same five companies that drive index gains in recoveries drive the losses in every subsequent slump, making portfolio concentration in them a structural exposure rather than a stock pick.
The trend: Mega-cap tech is trading as a single correlated block whose periodic synchronized selloffs — March 2020, September 2020, September 2021, May 2022 — now function as the market's main source of index-level risk.