Facebook, Inc. (NASDAQ:FB) plunged 19 percent Thursday after the company’s second-quarter earnings report. Incredibly, the earnings crash shaved more than $120 billion off of the company’s market cap in a matter of hours.
Experts React
Facebook’s disastrous day has been the talk of Wall Street. CNBC’s Carl Quintanilla tweeted that only one other time since September 2014 has a FANG stock to gap down by more than 15 percent following a quarterly earnings report.
CNBC’s Joe Terranova tweeted that Facebook’s day is historically bad.
In fact, Facebook’s trading action on Thursday could result in the most destruction of value by a single stock in a single day ever. Intel Corporation (NASDAQ:INTC) currently holds the record for biggest single-day market cap loss at $90 billion during the bursting of the dot com bubble back in September of 2000.
Value Destruction
Just how much value have investors lost? General Electric Company (NYSE:GE), Paypal Holdings Inc (NASDAQ:PYPL) and salesforce.com, inc. (NYSE:CRM) all have market caps of less than $120 billion. In fact, so does 91 percent of the entire S&P 500. A $120 market cap represents more than twice the size of General Motors Company (NYSE:GM) and about four times the size of Southwest Airlines Co (NYSE:LUV). A $120 billion loss is more than the annual gross domestic product of Ukraine ($109.3 billion) and Puerto Rico ($98.8 billion).
Unfortunately for millennials, young investors are taking a large portion of the Facebook hit. Last year, TD Ameritrade reported that Facebook was the second most commonly-owned stock among millennial investors.
Facebook shares closed Thursday at $176.25. Its market cap now stands at around $503.5 billion.
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