Ouch: Tech and media stocks are getting hammered

5/5/22 8:00PM

Yesterday the NASDAQ index fell 5%, its biggest one-day decline since 2020, as the list of stocks with eye-watering losses got a little bit longer.

Most notable yesterday was e-commerce darling Shopify, which fell 15% after posting its slowest revenue growth in 7 years, leaving its shares down 70% this year, worse even than Netflix's high profile meltdown, which has seen its shares fall 69%.

Indeed, of the 192 large stocks in the Technology and Communication Services sectors, 167 are down this year. The only notable exception? Twitter — thanks to Elon Musk's bid for the company that was way ahead of where the shares were trading.‍

What's changed?

‍Everything just seems to be slowing down. The pandemic accelerated a lot of digital transformation, and investors, who were flush with cash from monetary and fiscal stimulus, rushed into tech stocks. With interest rates finally rising, inflation at 40-year highs and growth slowing, a lot of those companies are just on a less attractive trajectory than they were 6 months ago.

‍It's not just tech

‍As the fastest-growing part of the market, tech stocks usually whipsaw around more than other industries — and they are bearing the brunt of this sell-off — but it hasn't been a tech exclusive event. The S&P 500 index is now down 14% on the year, and every sector has lost ground — except Energy &Utilities.

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Prediction markets have, predictably, been given a boost by the summer of sports

Major platforms like Kalshi and Polymarket have seen huge upticks in users of late, thanks in no small part to what’s felt like a recent sporting smorgasbord, with major competitions across hockey, basketball, and soccer soaking up fans’ time (and spending, clearly) at the outset of summer.

While gaming industry groups may not like it, there’s been a huge change in the methods people are using to put money on the big games, with everyone from fortunate NYC bar owners, to a far less fortunate Spanish supporter, turning to prediction markets to try and turn their sports know-how into cold, hard cash.

According to a new report from Adam Blacker for apptopia, that shift might have been even more seismic than imagined in the wake of the NBA and NHL finals and around the 2026 World Cup kicking off.

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Anthropic pulls Fable and Mythos access worldwide after Trump administration bars their use by foreign nationals

Only days after releasing two versions of its next-gen AI model, Anthropic has disabled them for users worldwide.

Anthropic says it received a Friday night order from the Trump administration to suspend access to the models for any foreign national (anywhere in the world) — a group that included some Anthropic employees. In response, the company turned off access to everyone.

Last week, the company released to the public its much-anticipated Claude Fable 5 model (and its restricted version Claude Mythos 5, which is still being tested with trusted partners). Anthropic said in a blog post announcing the action that officials cited national security concerns with the new models, while offering few specific details.

The post said that the government gave the company “verbal evidence of a potential narrow, non-universal jailbreak” of the public Fable 5 model. A jailbreak is a means by which users can evade restrictions built into the code to unlock prohibited functionality. Anthropic downplayed the significance of the attack, and said other major models, such as OpenAI’s GPT-5.5, could also be affected by the technique described.

Fears of these first Mythos-class models being misused are running high, after Anthropic warned the cybersecurity world in May that the advanced cyber capabilities of Mythos have rapidly discovered thousands of vulnerabilities in ubiquitous software, leading to the decision to restrict the full version of the model to a close group of trusted partners for testing.

This morning, Axios reported that Anthropic technical staff have flown to Washington to meet with White House officials to resolve the issue.

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that the Trump administration’s decision to take action against Anthropic was prompted by discussions that Amazon CEO Andy Jassy had with officials, including Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. According to the report, Amazon researchers said they had been able to evade some of Fable 5’s security restrictions using specific prompts. Amazon is a major investor in Anthropic.

Anthropic is currently suing the US government to fight the Pentagon’s blacklisting of the company on national security grounds.

Statement on the US government directive to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5