Economic commentator Kyla Scanlon is noticing a potentially worrying trend in the investing outlook among younger generations.

“It’s a bifurcated world,” she told CNBC’s “ETF Edge” this week. 

Scanlon, 26, who rose to prominence through her social media videos on the market and economy, explained why some members of Generation Z are aggressively saving for milestones like retirement, while others are taking a far more lax approach. 

“You do have these people who are maxing out their 401(k)s. They’re doing everything they can to plan for retirement,” she said. “But then you have the other side, which is an element to financial nihilism, where people don’t want to save for retirement. They don’t want to save money in general because they don’t believe the future is there.”

Scanlon is aiming to bridge Gen Z’s divided financial attitudes with her new book, “In This Economy? How Money and Markets Really Work.”

“Financial education is always going to be an uphill battle, just because money is such a personal subject. But it’s important that we give people the tools that they need to start somewhere,” she said.

She points to the housing market as a prime example of where young people are falling behind. Gen Zers represented just 3% of total home buyers in 2023, according to a recent report from the National Association of Realtors — a statistic Scanlon attributes to higher interest rates.

“The younger generation definitely wants [homeownership], because there’s a lot of financial benefit to having equity,” she said. “People are just trying to figure out how to do that financially right now, considering where mortgage rates are, considering where home prices have been. It’s difficult.”

Disclaimer

Microsoft ended Friday’s U.S. trading session as the most valuable publicly traded company, surpassing Apple after briefly topping the iPhone maker during intraday trading Thursday.

Shares of Microsoft climbed more than 3% for the week, bringing the company’s market cap to $2.89 trillion, while Apple’s stock dropped by over 3%, lowering its valuation to $2.87 trillion.

Redburn Atlantic Equities analyst James Cordwell downgraded Apple to neutral from buy on Wednesday, citing “little room for upside over the next few years” in iPhone growth and an “anticipated underwhelming March quarter.”

Apple said Thursday that former Vice President Al Gore will retire from the company’s board next month after serving as a director since 2003.

Microsoft, meanwhile, got a vote of confidence Thursday after discussing its artificial intelligence capabilities to developers at an event in San Francisco. Piper Sandler analysts told clients in a note that they were “encouraged by the momentum around the most mature AI products” and mentioned that GitHub website traffic has accelerated year over year for three months in a row. The analysts have the equivalent of a buy rating on Microsoft shares.

Apple had been the most valuable public company for over a year, following brief periods when that distinction was held by Saudi Aramco and Microsoft.

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As the war between Israel and the Hamas militant group ramped up last month, Kenneth Suna took to his investing-focused TikTok account.

Suna began a video asking his more than 200,000 followers “if you’re cool with profiting off war,” before adding “I am not.” He went on to list the names and performances of defense-focused funds including the iShares U.S. Aerospace & Defense ETF (ITA) and the SPDR S&P Aerospace & Defense ETF (XAR).

“You have a choice where your money goes,” the 38-year-old Washington, D.C., resident told CNBC. “I would feel guilty.”

Suna is part of a group of everyday investors skirting the “returns at any costs” mentality on moral grounds. As the latest geopolitical conflict escalates, these investors are ignoring defense stocks despite the market axiom that those holdings tend to perform better in times of war.

Indeed, the iShares U.S. Aerospace & Defense ETF popped more than 4% in the week following Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack and went on to finish October up about 3.7%. Meanwhile, the benchmark S&P 500 index added just 0.5% that week and ended the month 2.2% lower.

Retail traders poured into defense stocks and funds in the aftermath of the invasion, but inflows have since cooled, according to Vanda Research. Defense giant RTX, which Vanda found was a top sector pick among individual investors, has climbed 14% since the start of October.

But not everyone sees the intensifying conflict as a moment to invest in defense stocks. Weapon Free Funds, a screening tool gauging defense exposure in portfolios, including the funds in your 401(k), recorded a five-fold increase in visits between the attack and early November from the 30 days prior. 

Weapon Free Funds is part of a family of tools from shareholder advocacy nonprofit As You Sow aimed at helping people check if their fund dollars are invested in companies tied to themes such as guns or deforestation. Andrew Behar, As You Sow’s CEO, said it can be particularly challenging for those with money in large funds to decipher which companies they are investing in.

“The person who earns the money should have the right to decide how it’s invested and should be able to invest in alignment with their values,” Behar said. “We find there’s a really strong correlation of people who want that, but they don’t know how to do it.”

The screening platform gives funds a letter grade. An “A” means no holdings were flagged in a military weapons screen, while an “F” indicates more than 4% were. (For reference, the SPDR S&P 500 ETF Trust (SPY), which tracks the broad S&P 500 index, earned a “D'” grade.)

Critics of defense companies have pointed to the fact that the need for their products can increase during periods of heightened geopolitical strife. The latest war’s impact on these businesses has already started becoming apparent: General Dynamics CFO Jason Aiken told analysts last month that artillery demand would likely see “upward pressure” as the Israel-Hamas conflict broke out alongside the ongoing war between Russia and Ukraine.

Those with moral qualms have also historically highlighted the death toll of war as a reason for their uneasiness.

Weapon Free Funds’ recent surge in interest surpassed what was seen in February and March of 2022 following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, As You Sow said.

That can be tied to differences in public consensus of how these conflicts should play out. While there was overwhelming international support for Ukraine to fight back with weapons, opinion appears to be more mixed on the Israel-Hamas war as calls for a ceasefire grow.

These moral calculations are the latest example of a growing trend of some investors wanting their holdings to reflect personal values. In one of the newest data points on the relationship, U.S. Bank found more than four-fifths of Gen Z and millennials would underperform the S&P 500′s 10-year return to ensure the companies they invested in had aligned with their beliefs.

“A common decision making process is that if I hold a value that I’m anti-war, then I don’t want to be holding stocks that enable war,” said Brad Barber, a finance professor focused on investor psychology at the University of California, Davis. “That is a fairly simple way of trying to invest in a way that’s consistent with one’s values.”

Meanwhile, Suna said he can feel caught between two schools of thought. There are those who tell him that war is going to happen anyway, so he might as well see the return on defense stocks. On the other side of the spectrum, he’s heard younger people say that they don’t invest because no corporation is perfect or because they see the stock market as an unequitable system for building wealth.

Suna is left walking a fine line: He views investing as creating a chance at retirement one day, but simultaneously needs to feel morally sound about where his money goes. Still, while he said choices about where to invest can sometimes be tricky or complex, deciding to avoid defense stocks wasn’t a particularly difficult call.

“More and more young people are saying, ‘You know what? You can invest how you want, but I’m not OK with that,'” Suna said. “Everyone draws the line somewhere.”

With a deal on the debt ceiling easing macro concerns, the implications of avoiding a default could pose new challenges for ETF investors.

“Interest rates are lower than you would think in the Treasury market,” Howard Lutnick, chairman and CEO of BGC Partners, told CNBC’s Bob Pisani on “ETF Edge” on Wednesday.

“Now [The Fed] will hit it with trillions of dollars of sales that will drive short-term interest rates higher,” he said. “And that will feel like a rate hike.”

Lutnik explained that the pressure from the Fed’s selloff will spur the central bank to hold off on raising interest rates again. Also, the trillions of dollars pulled out of the regional banking system and put into money market funds added pressure on big and systemic banks, he said, increasing the Fed’s constraints.

“The Fed is not raising [rates]don’t buy it,” Lutnick said. “They don’t raise.”

While the effect is positive for investors worried about further hikes, raising the debt ceiling next year could accelerate global liquidity drain.

“Low rates make people take risks [and] go buy stocks,” Lutnick said. “Now you have people saying, ‘Hey, maybe I should just put my money in Treasurys. I get 5% no risk. And that’s money coming from the stock market.”

As money market yields continue to rise, Lutnick said he sees capital continuing to flow out of stocks and into money market funds and government bond ETFs.

“You’re going to see the stock market go away, but the bond market is going to continue to attract money and get a lot of power,” Lutnick said.

But as investors prepare for an influx of Treasuries to enter the market, Tradeweb CEO Billy Hult stressed the importance of finding liquidity in the market to get a sense of how the government bond market is performing.

“The most sophisticated players that live and breathe in my space are oriented toward creating ETF technology around liquidity,” Hult said in the same segment. “This market is extremely solid.”

Hult explained that the incorporation of greater transparency, cost efficiency and technology into fixed income funds has helped accelerate the development of the bond market. In turn, he said, investors’ interest in bonds and government bonds will eventually be expressed through ETFs.

“That’s not going to change,” Hult said. It’s the easier and more liquid way to express an opinion.”

Rebuttal

BEIJING — A niche web browser Opera plans to integrate ChatGPT into its Opera parent products Kunlun Tech announced on Wednesday.

No details were shared about timing or whether the features will be available across all Opera products — which include desktop and mobile browsers for iOS and Android.

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The news comes as Microsoft and Google this week announced plans to incorporate AI chatbot technology with its own search engines. ChatGPT, developed by Microsoft-backed OpenAI, has gained popularity since its release in late November.

Google’s Chrome browser has the largest market share in the world at 65.4 percent, while Microsoft’s Edge browser has a 4.5 percent share, according to Statcounter data for January.

Opera ranks sixth in the global browser market with a 2.4 percent share, the data show.

Norway-based Opera, which also runs a browser specialized for games, had an average of 321 million monthly active users as of the third quarter. The company said its gaming browser business helped boost revenue in the third quarter, up 28% year over year to $85.3 million.

Parent company Kunlun Tech is based in Beijing and listed on the Shenzhen Stock Exchange. In December, the company announced its work in an array of AI-generated content, such as music and images, to be made open source.

Shares of Kunlun Tech are up more than 40% for the year to date. Opera’s Nasdaq-listed shares are up just over 10% over that time period.

Many companies have been quick to announce their work in products similar to ChatGPT.

Chinese tech giant Baidu said this week that it will likely complete internal testing of its own AI chatbot in March before making the product publicly available.

Ali Baba is also working on a ChatGPT competitor, but did not disclose the timing.

It’s unclear how these new AI features would compare to ChatGPT’s capabilities.

When it comes to mobile search, Google has a whopping 96.5% share of the global market, while Baidu is second with a 0.7% share, according to Statcounter.

The Nasdaq just wrapped up its fifth consecutive week of gains, jumping 3.3% over the past five days. It’s the longest weekly winning streak for the tech-heavy index since late November 2021. After its worst year since 2008, the Nasdaq is up 15% through early 2023.

The last time tech stocks enjoyed a rally this long, investors were bracing for the electric car maker of Rivian blockbuster IPO, the US economy was closing in on its strongest year of growth since 1984, and the Nasdaq was trading at record highs.

There’s a lot less champagne this time around. Cost-cutting has replaced growth on Wall Street’s checklist, and tech executives are touted for efficiency over innovation. The IPO market is dead. Redundancies abound.

Earnings reports were the story of the week, with results coming from many of the world’s most valuable technology companies. But the numbers, for the most part, weren’t good.

An apple missed grades for the first time since 2016, Facebook parent Meta recorded a third consecutive quarter of declining revenues, Googlethe core advertising business declined and Amazon ended its weakest year of growth in its 25-year history as a public company.

Although investors had mixed reactions to the individual reports, all four stocks closed the week with solid gains, as Microsoftwhich reported earnings the previous week and issued vague guidance to forecast revenue growth this quarter of only about 3%.

Meta was the best performer of the bunch this week, with the stock jumping 23%, its third-best week on record. In Wednesday’s earnings report, revenue came in slightly above estimates, even as year-over-year sales fell, and the first-quarter forecast was roughly in line with expectations.

Key to the rally was CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s earnings call that 2023 will be the “Year of Efficiency” and his promise that “we are focused on becoming a stronger and more agile organization.”

“It’s really been a game changer,” Stephanie Link, chief investment strategist at Hightower Advisors, said in an interview Friday on CNBC’s “Squawk Box.”

“The quarter itself was OK, but they finally bought into the cost cutting and so I think Metta really took off,” she said.

Zuckerberg acknowledged that times are changing. From the year of its IPO in 2012 to 2021, the company is growing between 22% and 58% annually. But in 2022, revenue fell 1%, and analysts expect growth of just 5% in 2023, according to Refinitiv.

On the earnings call, Zuckerberg said he doesn’t expect the declines to continue, “but I also don’t think it’s going to go back to where it was before.” Meta announced in November that it would cut 11,000 jobs, or 13% of its workforce.

Link said the reason Meta stock had such a big jump after earnings was because “expectations were so low and the valuation was so compelling.” The stock has lost nearly two-thirds of its value in the past year, far more than its mega-cap peers.

Apple, which fell 27% last year, gained 6.2% this week despite reporting its steepest drop in revenue in seven years. CEO Tim Cook said the results were impacted by a strong dollar, manufacturing issues in China affecting the iPhone 14 Pro and iPhone 14 Pro Max and the overall macroeconomic environment.

“Apple is doing pretty well in this admittedly very difficult environment overall,” Dan Flax, an analyst at Neuberger Berman, told “Squawk Box” on Friday. “As we move through the coming months and quarters, we will see a return to growth and the market will begin to reflect that.” We continue to like the name even in the face of these macro challenges.”

Amazon Chief Executive Andy Jassy, ​​who will succeed Jeff Bezos in mid-2021, took the unusual step of joining the earnings call with analysts on Thursday after his company posted a weaker-than-expected first-quarter forecast. In January, Amazon began layoffs that are expected to result in the loss of more than 18,000 jobs.

“Given that this past quarter was the end of my first full year in this role, and given some of the unusual parts in the economy and our business, I thought this might be a good thing to join,” Jassi said during the the conversation.

Cost management has become a big topic for Amazon, which grew rapidly during the pandemic and later admitted it had hired too many people during that period.

“We’re working really hard to streamline our costs,” Jassi said.

Alphabet is also in downsizing mode. The company announced last month that it was cutting 12,000 jobs. Its fourth-quarter earnings miss included disappointing YouTube sales due to a pullback in ad spending and weakness in its cloud division as businesses tighten their belts.

Ruth Porath, CFO of Alphabet, told CNBC’s Deirdre Bossa that the company is meaningfully slowing its hiring pace in an effort to ensure long-term profitable growth.

Alphabet shares ended the week up 5.4%, even after giving up some of their gains during Friday’s selloff. The stock is already up 19% for the year.

If the Nasdaq continues its uptrend and posts a sixth week of gains, it will match the longest rally in a period that ended in January 2020, just before the Covid pandemic hit the US

Investors will now turn to earnings reports from smaller companies. Some of the names they will hear next week include Pinterest, Robin Hood, Confirm and Cloudflare.

Another area in tech that boomed this week was the semiconductor space. Like consumer technology companies, there hasn’t been much growth to excite Wall Street.

AMD on Tuesday beat sales and profit, but pointed analysts to a 10% year-over-year revenue decline for the current quarter. Intel, AMD’s main competitor, reported a disastrous quarter last week and forecast a 40% drop in March sales.

Still, AMD jumped 14% for the week and Intel rose nearly 8%. Texas Instruments and Nvidia also posted good profits.

The semiconductor industry is facing a glut of spare parts at PC and server makers and falling prices for components such as memory and CPUs. But after a miserable year in 2022, stocks are rebounding on signs that easing Federal Reserve rate hikes and falling inflation will give companies a boost later this year.

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TikTok is beginning to feel the sting of political and regulatory pressure in Europe, where the Chinese-owned app has largely avoided the scrutiny it faces in the US

European Internal Market Commissioner Thierry Breton warned TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew at a meeting this month that the bloc could ban the app if it did not comply with new digital content rules well before the September 1 deadline.

It’s a marked shift from the EU’s near silence on TikTok, while US lawmakers were aggressive, banning the app from federal devices in December over national security concerns. A proposed bipartisan bill also seeks to block the app from operating in the US

Not that the EU is soft on technology. Europe fines US tech giants for breaching the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation.

The difference with TikTok is that the app is shielded from the crosshairs of commercial interests in Europe.

“There is no political demand to investigate Chinese organizations,” Hosuke Lee-Makiyama, director of the think tank European Center for International Political Economy, said in an interview in December.

“TikTok’s user base is much bigger than many people think in Europe,” he said. But, he added, “you’re not going to look very closely if they’re not stealing too much of your ad revenue.”

TikTok had about 275 million monthly active users in Europe as of December, according to Sensor Tower’s Abe Youssef, noting that’s more than a third of Europe’s population of about 750 million.

TikTok was the most downloaded social media app last year in Italy and Spain, according to data.ai, formerly known as App Annie. The app takes second place in France and Germany, the data shows.

WhatsApp, owned by Facebook parent Meta, ranked first among social media app downloads in France and Germany and third in Italy and Spain, according to data.ai.

Meta reported $29.06 billion in revenue in Europe in 2021, a region the company defined as including Russia and Turkey. In contrast, TikTok recorded turnover of just $531 million in the European Union in 2021, according to the latest UK filing available, but that’s more than four times what it disclosed for 2020.

“It is taking some time for the European Commission to act on these issues,” said Dexter Thillien, lead technology and telecommunications analyst at The Economist Intelligence Unit.

“It’s not for lack of desire on the part of the European Commission to do something,” Thillen told CNBC in a phone interview. “They have their hands full with bigger companies.”

TikTok is not yet a giant on the scale of companies like Meta, Alphabet and Amazon when it comes to social media, advertising and e-commerce. But TikTok has become so popular that its app has inspired copycat products, like Meta’s short video Reels feature.

More than half of 16- to 24-year-olds in France and Germany use TikTok, according to data.ai.

Since its launch in 2016, TikTok has amassed a monthly global user base of more than 1 billion and cemented the careers of well-known media personalities, from the D’Amelio sisters to Addison Rae.

This gives it an attractive set of data to train its algorithms to aggressively target users with content that best matches their interests. TikTok’s parent company, Beijing-based ByteDance, has seen similar success in China with a local version of the app called Douyin.

A big fear among U.S. intelligence officials — and increasingly lawmakers in Europe — is that Beijing could influence how TikTok directs its users to engage in propaganda or censorship.

“TikTok’s success is the result of a failure of European politics,” Moritz Koerner, a member of the European Parliament from Germany’s Free Democratic Party, told CNBC via email.

“From a geopolitical point of view, the EU’s inaction on TikTok is naive.”

Corner is calling on the European Commission to put pressure on data protection authorities to take action against TikTok from 2019. He worries that the platform poses “several unacceptable risks for European users”, including “access to data by Chinese authorities, censorship, [and] tracking journalists’.

“The data dragon TikTok should be put under the surveillance of the European authorities,” Koerner said. “Europe must finally wake up.

Last month, ByteDance admitted to using TikTok data of two journalists to track their physical movements, according to a widely circulated internal memo. Concerns about surveillance, in addition to the EU’s tough Digital Services Act, were a big topic of conversation at Chew’s meetings with EU officials earlier this month.

The DSA, which was approved last year, is yet to be implemented in Europe. EU officials are putting pressure on tech giants of all stripes to get their houses in order before a September 1 deadline, including TikTok.

“The EU takes privacy and data protection issues very seriously. And it’s building one of the strictest regulatory architectures for digital platforms, including TikTok, in the world,” Manuel Munitz, chancellor at IE University, told CNBC.

Under China’s counter-espionage and national security rules, TikTok’s parent company ByteDance and other Chinese tech firms would be forced to share user data with Beijing if requested by the government, experts told CNBC.

This was a cause for concern as the US pressured allies to ban Huawei, the Chinese telecommunications giant, in 2019. Addressing the National Intelligence Act at a 2019 press conference, a Chinese government spokesman said intelligence work should be carried out “according to the law” and urged people “not to take anything out of context”.

China’s foreign ministry did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

TikTok has acknowledged that data about its European users can be accessed by employees based in China, but denies ever sharing such information with the Chinese government.

The company, however, says it is committed to creating a robust system for processing the data of Europeans in Europe.

This reflects a big difference: European regulators have focused on data processing, while US regulators look for threats to national security.

Meanwhile, investigations into TikTok’s access to user data in China are “beginning to bear fruit,” according to Thillien.

Investigations take time. It took almost five years for the Irish Data Protection Commission to close its investigation into Meta’s targeted advertising practices, resulting in a fine of over $400 million.

The commission is investigating whether TikTok’s transfer of user data to China and the processing of data on minors violated the bloc’s strict GDPR privacy rules. An outcome of the Irish privacy inquiry is not expected until later this year or 2024.

An apple shares fell more than 3% in Tuesday trading, giving the iPhone maker a market capitalization below $2 trillion for the first time since May.

Apple fell $3.74% to $130.20 a share, a 52-week low, giving the company a $1.99 trillion valuation at Tuesday’s market close.

Apple first reached a $2 trillion valuation in August 2020 as the pandemic boosted sales of computers and phones for remote work and school. It briefly reached a market cap of over $3 trillion during trading in January 2022.

Apple struggled with iPhone 14 Pro shipments during the holiday season due to Covid restrictions on its main factory in China. Investors are also wary of rising interest rates and declining consumer confidence, which could hurt demand for Apple’s premium-priced products.

A recent report from supply chain analyst Trendforce said Apple’s iPhone shipments fell 22% in the December quarter. Apple has told suppliers to produce fewer components for products including AirPods, the Apple Watch and MacBook laptops, according to Nikkei.

Apple is the latest major company to walk away from its $2 trillion valuation. Microsoft previously hit the $2 trillion mark, but pulled back from it in 2022.

The broader market was lower on Tuesday, with the S&P 500 down nearly 1% in trading.

In 2022, Apple underperformed the S&P 500, which fell more than 18%. Apple’s stock price fell nearly 27% in 2022.

Shares of Disney appeared Monday, the morning after the company announced it had replaced CEO Bob Chapek with Bob Iger.

Disney shares were up more than 6% on Monday morning. As of Friday’s close, the company’s shares had fallen about 40% so far this year.

Capek, who succeeded Iger as CEO in early 2020, has come under increasing criticism and scrutiny over the company’s performance in recent months. Its most recent quarterly earnings report, which came out earlier this month, arrived with a bang, sending the company’s stock sharply lower. Three days after that report, Chapek told his lieutenants in a memo that Disney would try to cut costs through hiring freezes, layoffs and other means.

Still, the decision to replace Čapek with Iger stunned the business world. Iger, who spent 15 years as Disney chief, previously said he would not return to work until the company renewed Chapek’s contract earlier this year as he pushed for his vision for reorganizing Disney.

Capek took over just before the Covid pandemic severely hampered Disney’s business, closing theme parks and not releasing movies in theaters for months. While Chapek helped the company weather that storm, with Iger still as chairman until last December, the company’s stock rose to just over $200 at one point in 2021.

Since then, Disney’s stock has plummeted. They closed below $100 on Friday.

During Chapek’s tenure, as of Friday, Disney shares had fallen 28%, while the Dow had climbed 25% and the S&P 500 was up 27%. This year, Disney is among the three worst performers in the Dow, along with Intel and Salesforce.

— CNBC’s Robert Humm contributed to this article.

What started as a recovery in the third quarter turned into a bust for tech investors.

The Nasdaq Composite fell 5.1% this week after losing 5.5% the previous week. This marks the worst two-week period for the tech index since it plunged more than 20% in March 2020 at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic in the US

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Meta is a buy as the social media giant embarks on a cost-cutting plan

With the third quarter due to end next week, the Nasdaq is poised for a third straight quarter of losses unless it can erase the current 1.5% decline over the last five trading days of the period.

Investors have been dumping tech stocks since late 2021, betting that rising inflation and higher interest rates will have a huge impact on the companies that rose the most during the boom. The Nasdaq is now just above its two-year low set in June.

Markets were hit by continued interest rate hikes by the Fed, which on Wednesday raised benchmark interest rates by another three-quarters of a percentage point and signaled they would continue to rise well above current levels as it tries to take inflation off record highs. its levels since the early 1980s. The central bank raised its federal funds rate to a range of 3%-3.25%, the highest level since early 2008, after a third consecutive 0.75 percentage point move.

Meanwhile, as rising interest rates pushed the 10-year Treasury yield to an 11-year high, the dollar strengthened. This makes American products more expensive in other countries, which hurts technology companies that have a lot of exports.

“It’s a one-two punch on technology,” Jack Ablin, chief investment officer of Cresset Capital, told CNBC’s “TechCheck” on Friday. “A strong dollar does not help technology. The high yield on 10-year Treasuries is not helping technology.”

Among the group of mega-caps, Amazon had the worst week, falling nearly 8%. Google parent Alphabet and Facebook parent Meta tumbled about 4%. All three companies are in the process of cutting costs or freezing hiring as they grapple with some combination of weakening consumer demand, low advertising spending and inflationary pressures on wages and products.

As CNBC reported Friday, Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai faced heated questions from employees at an all-hands meeting this week. Employees expressed concern about cost cuts and recent comments from Pichai about the need to improve productivity by 20%.

Tech earnings season is about a month away, and growth expectations are muted. Alphabet is expected to report a single-digit increase in revenue after growth of more than 40% a year earlier, while Meta expects a second straight quarter of sales declines. Apple’s growth is expected to reach just over 6%. Expectations for Amazon and Microsoft are higher, at around 10% and 16% respectively.

The past week has been particularly tough for some companies in the sharing economy. Airbnb, Uber, Lyft and DoorDash saw declines of between 12% and 14%. In the cloud software market, which has soared in recent years before collapsing in 2022, some of the steepest decliners were in shares of GitLab (-16%), Bill.com (-15%), Asana (-14 %) and Confluent (-13%).

Cloud giant Salesforce held its annual Dreamforce conference this week in San Francisco. During the financials portion of the conference call, the company announced a new long-term profitability goal that showed its determination to operate more efficiently.

Salesforce is aiming for a 25 percent adjusted operating margin, including future acquisitions, Chief Financial Officer Amy Weaver said. That’s up from the 20% goal Salesforce announced a year ago for fiscal 2023. The company is trying to reduce sales and marketing as a percentage of revenue, in part through more self-service efforts and by improving salesperson productivity.

Shares of Salesforce fell 3% for the week and are down 42% for the year.

“There’s so much going on in the market,” co-CEO Marc Benioff told CNBC’s Jim Cramer in an interview at Dreamforce. “Between currencies and recession or pandemic. All these things where you kind of manage a lot of power.’

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