Softbank slide deepens to $22bn amid tech rout

Bloomberg

SoftBank Group Corp. has been battered over the past two weeks as technology stocks plummet globally.
SoftBank shares fell 7.3 percent to 9,251 yen at the close in Tokyo on Monday, pushing the decline in market value to $22 billion since its peak this year.
The stock had gained 29 percent this year through September 28 as investors began to credit founder Masayoshi Son for his ambitious investments in technology startups, including Uber Technologies Inc., Didi Chuxing and WeWork Cos.
But Son has been dealt successive setbacks in the past two weeks. Tech shares have retreated in the face of the US-China trade war, potentially jeopardizing the value of SoftBank’s portfolio companies.
“We are not liking how Softbank has been trading and have decided to remove it from our recommended longs,” Amir Anvarzadeh, a senior strategist with Asymmetric Advisors in Singapore, wrote in a research note on Monday.
“We are starting to worry about other more likely scenarios that could prove as disruptive to Son’s plans,” he wrote. “Firstly and most importantly, we believe tech names will remain under selling pressure leaving Vision Fund’s paper profits on names like Nvidia (NVDA) vulnerable to big under-performance relative to the fund’s targets.”