Netflix, eBay help trigger a further NASDAQ plunge

By Scott M. Fulton, III, BetaNews

October 6, 2008, 6:06 PM

Sometimes when investors get the feeling in advance that it's going to be a bad day in the markets, it doesn't take too much bad news to validate their fears. This morning, some relatively minor bad news had a magnified market impact.

Early this morning, Netflix made some admissions that, on a normal business day, would be viewed as a minor downtick in an otherwise healthy company. It missed its nationwide subscriber goal for the past quarter by 3,000. No, not three million -- three thousand, with 8.672 million subscribers at the end of the third quarter.

There was some potentially worse news to come, however: The company has reset its subscriber projection lower by 3%, from a mid-range of 9.4 million to a mid-range of 9.1 million. That would still be a sizable gain in subscribers from the fourth quarter of 2007. But while July looked good for Netflix, its executives said, its August looked bad; and while the final numbers for September aren't yet compiled, it's probably worse.

How much worse? Revenue projections for the fourth quarter were cut by 1.7%. Like I said, on a normal day, you might not even be reading this.

Anyway, strike one for a good day in the technology markets, following last Friday's approval from the House of Representatives on a rewritten economic bailout plan. Strike two came from eBay, whose mixed bag -- acquiring overseas properties while laying off 1,000 in advance -- struck many as peculiar.

Strike three came from SAP, Germany's largest software maker, which today trimmed its estimates of earnings from services down to a "mere" 14% annual gain. In so doing, the company blamed the global economic crisis.

With an already bipolar investment climate, three little downticks were as good as a full-blown omen. Huge losses were felt in both the NYSE and NASDAQ exchanges by mid-afternoon, during which the Dow 30 had dropped over 800 points and the NASDAQ had hit a four-year low. But bargain hunters saved the day, capping losses to 4.3% for the NASDAQ index at 1,862.96; and the Dow bouncing back to only a 3.6% loss, down 369.88 at 9,955.50 -- still below the psychological "floor" of 10,000.

Most of the other tech stocks were dragged down by the weight of it all. Microsoft tumbled another 5.4%, HP was down 4.8%, Yahoo was down 4.3%, struggling AMD lost another 6.6% to close at $4.23, and Adobe Systems shed 9% of its value to close at $30.64. Sirius XM was also hit very hard -- shedding only $0.08 of share value, but that's a 13.7% loss when your stock is already trading at only $0.50.