Apples shares were tumbling, and it hadnt yet delivered the bad news about a sales slowdown in China for the iPhone, a device that had helped make it the modern eras first trillion-dollar company.
Just as it appeared that the big tech companies endless upward march had finally come to an end, they led a remarkable rally.
This year, the S&P 500 tech sector is up roughly 40 percent, handily outpacing the 25 percent gain for the benchmark index over all, which is itself the third-best annual return of the past two decades.
And Facebook whose chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, has spent much of the past two years telling lawmakers why his company can be trusted on issues as varied as personal data and cryptocurrency is up nearly 54 percent.
The trade-sensitive chip maker AMD more than doubled on such a swing in sentiment, making it the best-performing stock in the S&P 500 so far this year.
But the giants of technology companies like Apple, Alphabet, Amazon, Facebook and Microsoft are the stocks that have made the markets year.
That has driven Apple and Microsoft which also happen to be the largest companies in the United States, by market cap to their best performances in a decade.
Original article