Second stock out in COVID pandemic. Wall Street thinks it could get a lot worse.

Toward the end of 2020, when we learned that a COVID-19 vaccine was ready for the general public, Wall Street began to tell investors about a new way of doing business. Investors would no longer like high-growth tech stocks, the message said. Value stocks, like energy and consumer staples, would take their place instead. Wall Street was right on the money. So far in 2022, tech stocks that were once on top are taking a beating. The Nasdaq has lost 14.4% this year, and 16.4% since hitting an all-time high in mid-November, when the Omicron wave hit the developed world. This may seem like a good time to buy stocks, but very few experts say this is the bottom. In the market, there are a lot of reasonably valued and profitable businesses. There are also a lot of dangerously overvalued and unprofitable businesses that could lose a lot of money, and some could lose all of their value.People were treating a lot of growth stocks, like Zoom, PayPal, and the companies in Cathie Wood’s Ark Innovation ETF, as if they were the plague even before Omicron. All of these companies rose in value during the second half of 2020, when Omicron came out. These companies’ top-line growth slowed down, so investors began to sell. A lot of people have lost more money this time around than they did in February and March 2020, when the stock market went into freefall after the World Health Organization declared COVID a pandemic. PayPal, Netflix, and Meta are all in freefall right now. People who own stocks aren’t happy with PayPal. On Friday, the stock closed at $103.65, which is 15% below its pre-pandemic high for the year 2020. There has been a huge drop in the value of PayPal shares. During the next 15 months, the company’s shares rose more than three times as people used and made money from it. Then, just as quickly, the shares fell, losing billions of dollars in value as growth slowed down.Two-thirds of the value of the company that makes digital payments has gone away since it hit a record high in mid-summer in 2021. People who are PayPal fans have been hurting a lot because they lost a lot. Over the past seven months, the share price has dropped by twice as much as it did in February and March 2020. As the chart below shows, PayPal isn’t the only company that does this. The shares of Netflix, Facebook’s parent company Meta, and Twitter have all taken bigger hits this time than they did in the early days of COVID, when COVID was still going strong. It shows how many shares were sold off during the huge February-March 2020 sell-off. The light red line in the chart shows this. Round One. The darker red line above shows how these stocks have fared since their last all-time high and Friday’s closing price. This is called Round Two carnage. On Fortune.com, you can look at this interactive chart that changes as you move your mouse. Moderna is one of the stocks that isn’t on the chart, but it is. In August, the Nasdaq-listed vaccine company hit its all-time high. Since then, the stock has lost 71% of its value. Boom, bust, and repeat
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