Alphabet 10% Plunge Follows Tesla in Stern Warning on Valuation

  • High multiples pressure tech stocks amid mixed earnings
  • ‘Companies have been priced for perfection’: O’Rourke

The Google campus in Mountain View, California.

Photographer: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg
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Looking for a unifying theory on what’s ailing equities in a world of vacillating bond yields, iffy earnings and mixed messages from the Federal Reserve? Try valuations.

That they’re too high, in short, bloated by the relentless seven-month ascent in a handful of artificial-intelligence super stocks. What else explains how earnings missteps at Tesla Inc. and now Alphabet Inc. morphed into more than 9% single-day selloffs in the span of a week? For Google’s parent company, it was the second worst post-earnings selloff on record.