This Was the Year Tech Stocks Became Sure Bets
2016 was the year tech got “fangs.”
Well, not literally. FANGs was a term coined by CNBC business guru Jim Cramer in 2015 to describe the high-performing stocks of the massively successful tech companies Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, and Google (now called Alphabet). Today, it’s not these particular companies that are technically at the top of the Wall Street leaderboard—that distinction falls to Apple, Alphabet, Microsoft, Amazon, and Facebook. But “FANGs” has become convenient shorthand for a phenomenon that emerged in 2016: the value of tech couldn’t be shaken, no matter what volatility existed out in the wider world. This was the year the new giants of tech became a truly dominant market force.
Just look at what happened for a few hours in late July, and definitively the next month. At the close of the public trading market on the first Monday of August, the top companies in the world by market value were all American technology companies: No. 1 was Apple; followed closely by Alphabet, Microsoft, Amazon, and Facebook. (Netflix, an original FANG, is still a very successful— and growing—company in its own right.
wired.com |
