Nasdaq sinks for third straight day on FAANG stocks rout

The technology-heavy Nasdaq Composite Index has registered its third consecutive loss of 1% for the first time since August 2015.

FAANG stocks - Facebook (NasdaqGS: FB - news) , Amazon, Apple (NasdaqGS: AAPL - news) , Netflix (Xetra: 552484 - news) and Google's parent Alphabet (Swiss: GOOGL-USD.SW - news) - have all been in retreat since Facebook warned it expects weaker growth as it increases spending to tackle concerns over the way personal data is handled.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 0.56%, while the S&P 500 lost 0.6% and the Nasdaq (Frankfurt: 813516 - news) slid 1.39%.

Twitter (Frankfurt: A1W6XZ - news) , which lost a million users as it cleans up the social media platform from hate speech, also fell sharply, down 8%.

The FANG index fell more than 2.8%, taking its losses for the last three trading days into correction territory, which is defined as a fall of 10%.

Almost $240bn has been wiped off the S&P 500 Information Technology index since Facebook's disappointing user numbers.

While Alphabet and Amazon both provided impressive earnings, they could not avoid the rout, falling 1.8% and 2.2% respectively.

Apple, which is due to report its third-quarter earnings after the close of markets on Tuesday, declined 0.5%.

"There's a lot of money and speculation piled into the FAANG stocks and now that money is coming out," Wayne Kaufman, chief market analyst at Phoenix Financial Services in New York, told Reuters.

"It's money coming out of a crowded trade, and people are concerned about the midterm election news cycle and about tariffs to some degree."