Tech stocks search for direction amid tech sell-off volatility

Yahoo Finance tech editor Dan Howley breaks down the volatility in the tech sector and what's driving down stock prices for names like Apple and Amazon.

Video transcript

DAVE BRIGGS: We're at the end of the third quarter, just a week away now mercilessly. And the NASDAQ down 30% year to date. Let's look back at how some big names in the tech space performed and what's ahead for Q4. Tech reporter Dan Howley with us here with what we hope is maybe a little bit of optimism down the road. Hey, Dan.

DAN HOWLEY: Yeah, maybe a little bit further down the road than we would like. But let's talk about some of the big names in tech and how they performed. We look at the biggest one, obviously, Apple. They are suffering but not suffering as badly as some of their competitors. They're only down year to date about 15% as far as stock price goes. They announced their new iPhones, as well as their new Apple Watch and those AirPods.

There's hope among analysts that into the holiday season, they'll see good sales of this, at least steady sales. This is the iPhone 14. They're hoping that it matches up as equally with the iPhone 13 as far as sales volumes go, especially in China and the US. We've also seen, obviously, Amazon take a big hit. That company's stock price, that's down around 32% year to date.

They took a hit throughout the year because of some of those issues that we talked about with the actual sales side of things, the e-commerce side of things, where they weren't performing as well as during the pandemic. And they expanded largely to meet the demand for the pandemic. And so now they have to scale that back and kind of recalibrate.

We also look at Google. Obviously, they've been hit as part of the kind of rearranging that's going on as a result of Apple's privacy changes in iOS 14. That stock price is down around 30%. Meta, that's really been slammed. That's going back to that Apple privacy change. They're down around 50% year to date.

And then we look at something along the lines of an NVIDIA, which is also down more than 50% year to date. They've been slammed as a result of the chip issues that have been ongoing, as well as their forecasts that they're not seeing as robust sales as they wanted to prior to their most recent quarter. They had announced changes there. You know, it's all across the board here. Microsoft down as well. That's looking around 29%. And then we can look at, obviously, next to the S&P 500, the only one that's looking good is Apple, which is actually trending above it.