What happened
Wednesday is looking like it's going to be another rough one for tech stocks. With the Nasdaq down 2.2% as of 11:45 a.m. ET, shares of many of the biggest names in big tech are falling in tandem:
- Apple (AAPL +3.26%) is down 2.1%.
- Amazon (AMZN +1.25%) is off 3%.
- Meta Platforms (FB 0.55%) is losing 3.6%.
Image source: Getty Images.
So what
And yet, in the absence of much news obviously affecting these three stocks (other than the generalized sell-off in tech), there really seems to be good reason for only two of these stocks going down today. You see, if there's any common thread running through each of Apple, Amazon, and Meta today, it's the fact that all three of these tech giants featured prominently in Piper Sandler's just-released 43rd Semi-Annual Generation Z Survey of 7,100 U.S. Teens.
In this survey, which Piper began more than two decades ago, the investment bank tracks sentiment among U.S. teens and Gen Z regarding major U.S. consumer brands, based on the theory that a stock that's popular with a young and growing segment of the American population will logically outperform a stock that's losing popularity. And what does Piper's latest survey find?
Well, first and foremost, it finds that teens are a very important market, spending both time and money -- $2,367 each annually -- on the brands they love.
Now what
This is good news for Apple. According to Piper's survey, 87% of U.S. teens own an iPhone today, and they're getting increasingly invested in the brand. Seventy-two percent of teens also own AirPods -- and Apple Pay is now the top-ranked payment app among teens in the U.S.
It's less good news for Amazon and Meta, however -- in that order. In the case of Amazon, on the plus side, Amazon.com "still remains the No. 1 website" among teens, with 53% of teens surveyed liking the site. In a worrisome trend, however, female teens' affinity for Amazon has taken a steep dive over the past year, falling from 47% to just 35%. In short, teens still love Amazon.com -- but only the boys.
Meanwhile for Meta, the news just keeps getting worse. Teens have their own language that's largely unintelligible to the rest of us, but one thing that's long been clear is that they see the Facebook social media site as being basically for "old people," right?
Well, to combat this, Meta Platforms bought then-up-and-coming Instagram back in 2012. But that was a decade ago, and Instagram may no longer be the hot property it once was. According to Piper's data, Instagram has fallen to third place behind TikTok and Snap's Snapchat in teen popularity -- and over the past year, Insta lost even more mindshare among teens.
In the context of a stock market that was already declining this morning, this is not the news that Amazon and Meta shareholders wanted to hear.
