NEW YORK (AP) ‐ As stocks hit record after record in the past decade, investors didn’t much care if a stock was cheap or expensive. What mattered most was: Is it growing quickly?
If the answer was yes, the stock was in high demand, almost regardless of the price. Investors were ravenous for companies able to add customers and deliver fat growth. So they were willing to pay premium prices for an Amazon or a Netflix. Left behind were stocks in more staid industries, even if they looked like better bargains by several measures.
Suddenly, though, the siren song of high growth has gone dissonant. As markets tumbled in recent weeks, the stocks that were soaring the highest have fallen the fastest. Worries about interest rates and global trade are raising concerns about the companies’ future growth. Plus, high-growth stocks had further to fall given how much more expensive they had grown versus the rest of the market by various measures.
So far this month, high-growth stocks in the Russell 3000 index have sunk 9 percent, versus 6.5 percent for their lower-priced counterparts known as "value" stocks, as of Wednesday. It’s the biggest such monthly gap in performance since November 2016. |