November’s sell-offs have pushed the popular FAANG stocks well below their average Wall Street price targets.
Facebook, Apple, Amazon and Google parent company Alphabet are now at least 20 percent below analysts’ expectations, while Netflix is as much as 35 percent below its average target.
Matt Maley, equity strategist at Miller Tabak, said FAANG’s recent decline could mean the stocks’ days of leading the market are behind them.
“They’re not going to be the big leadership group that we’ve seen in the past,” Maley told CNBC’s “Trading Nation” on Wednesday. “My concern is that this group is facing some regulation headwinds … so as they face this headwind, I don’t think institutional investors are going to go back and go to the big overweight position that they had in the past.”
All five of the stocks have tumbled into a correction, having fallen 10 percent or more since their highs earlier in the year. The worst hit, Facebook, is nearly 40 percent off its July record high.
“I don’t want to say I’m wildly negative and we’re not going to get a return to what we saw in 2000 and 2002 in the dot-com stocks but I do think that you’re not going to go back to that overweight in the group,” added Maley. “It’s not going to have that big surge that people have been hoping for.”
Chad Morganlander, portfolio manager at Washington Crossing Advisors, said the fundamentals remain strong for the FAANG names, but that’s not enough for him to get bullish on the group.
“The fundamental backdrop of these companies is quite robust going into 2019. Unfortunately, though, I do believe that valuations do matter and some of these names we would just stay away from,” Morganlander told “Trading Nation” on Wednesday.
Netflix is the most expensive FAANG stock by valuation. It trades at 102 times forward earnings, while Amazon, the second most expensive, trades at a 94 times multiple.
“We prefer large-cap value over large-cap growth at this point so we would actually overweight the Oracles, Ciscos of the world, and even look at Microsoft as perhaps a growthy, more alternative to the FAANG stocks,” he added.
Cisco, Oracle and Microsoft have also come under pressure over the past three months, but have sustained a fraction of the damage seen in the FAANG stocks.
Disclosure: Washington Crossing Advisors has positions in Oracle, Cisco and Microsoft.