Twitter Crashes with Tech Stocks at Nose Bleed Prices

Twitter and Amazon’s massive earnings disappointments Thursday shocked Wall Street and bashed the tech indexes that have been hitting incredible all-time-highs over the last month.

Twitter reported that despite shares spiking up 40 percent since mid-April, powered by the expectation that the effectiveness of the platform was rising due to tweets by President Donald Trump and other high-visibility celebrities, the number of monthly average users (MAU) was flat, at 328 million.

Twitter’s stock plunged by 14 percent as Wall Street traders ran for the exits. The Seeking Alpha blog reported that Twitter’s revenues were down by 4.6 percent for the year, and earnings-per-share tanked by 38 percent. Twitter’s quarterly revenue per MAU was $1.75, about 60 percent less than Facebook’s $4.55 per MAU.

The tech stocks were up by about 2 percent in July 27 pre-opening trading, led by Amazon. But the Twitter bloodbath caused tech shares to end the day down about 1 percent. Mighty Amazon hit an all-time-highat about noon in New York trading, up a stunning 15 percent for the month of July.

But after the 4 p.m. close of regular stock trading, Amazon reported earnings of just $628 million, down 40 percent from the analysts’ consensus estimate of $1.08 billion, according to Yahoo Finance.

Amazons’ sales growth was slightly ahead of estimates, with North American sales growth spiking up 27 percent and international sales up by 17 percent. The big revenue growth came from Amazon’s AWS (Amazon Web Services), which hold a 50 percent market share in cloud computing and saw revenues up 42 percent for the year to $4.1 billion.

But as Breitbart News warned on July 16, competing Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has positioned Azure cloud computing services to capture over 66 percent of the cloud hosting services for corporations with over 500 employees. Although the Azure unit only holds a 19 percent share of all cloud computing hosting, Azure can run smoothly on Windows, Android, IOS, or Linux.

Microsoft analysts commented that the only way that Amazon can keep its inferior cloud hosting service revenues from stalling has been to offer bigger and bigger discounts. They blame Amazon’s earnings crash to AWS trying to buy market share.

U.S. stock investors have been enjoying the second-longest bull market in history, with the Dow Jones Industrial Average up 373 percent since its March 6, 2009 low. But the NASDAQ 100 Index of the largest tech stocks is up an incredible 600 percent over the same period. Wall Street old-timers have a saying that when stock prices are at incredibly high prices, investors often get a nose-bleed.