US Stock Market Move | The NASDAQ fell by 1.6%, with popular technology stocks in general decline. Amazon.com, Inc. (AMZN.US) dropped by more than 4%.

On Thursday, the three major US stock indexes all opened lower, with the Nasdaq falling by 1.6%. Star tech stocks all experienced declines, with Alphabet Inc. Class CA (GOOGL.US) and Amazon.com, Inc. (AMZN.US) falling by over 4%, and Tesla, Inc. (TSLA.US), Microsoft Corporation (MSFT.US), and Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. (AMD.US) falling by over 3%. NVIDIA Corporation (NVDA.US) fell by over 1%. At the same time, the panic index VIX surged by 22%, reaching a new high not seen since December of last year. In terms of news, US job vacancies unexpectedly fell to their lowest levels since 2020 in December, with layoffs increasing slightly, further indicating weak demand for labor. Data from the Labor Department on Thursday showed that job vacancies in December decreased from a revised 6.93 million in November to 6.54 million, falling below market expectations. The decline in job vacancies mainly came from the professional and business services sector as well as the retail sector, while the increase in layoffs reflected an expansion of layoffs in the transportation and warehousing industry. Hiring has increased slightly, but still remains low overall. The data indicates that businesses are still cautious in their hiring pace when evaluating their workforce size and economic outlook. Furthermore, the pessimistic narrative of "Software-mageddon" in global stock markets is gaining momentum. Hedge funds are increasing their short positions in software stocks, becoming one of the catalysts for the fierce selling in this sector since the beginning of the year. Data from financial analysis company S3 Partners shows that hedge funds have made $24 billion in profits by shorting software stocks since 2026, while the total market value of the US software industry has decreased by $1 trillion during the same period.