WASHINGTON (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 25th October, 2018) US stocks plummeted on Friday, with the Dow Jones Industrial Average dropping more than 600 points and erasing all of the index's gains for 2018, as investor worried over prospects for future earnings.
MSNBC reported that an increasingly murky macro picture is clouding the 2019 earnings outlook, leaving investors to largely shrug off a solid start to the third quarter earnings season.
The selloff hit technology stocks especially hard with Facebook and Google parent Alphabet dropping more than 4 percent, Apple down 2 percent and AT&T off more than 7 percent, according to reports from major stock indexes.
The Standard and Poor's (S&P) index of 500 stocks fell more than 3 percent, also turning negative for the year, while the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite index declined 4.4 percent.
The plunge came halfway through a week when more than 100 companies report earnings, more than 80 percent of which have already disclosed profits that exceeded expectations, according to data from FactSet cited by the report.
