UnitedHealth Group (UNH) stock had one of its worst days ever on Thursday after the healthcare giant unexpectedly cut its profit forecast for the year.
UnitedHealth stock fell more than 22% on Thursday, its biggest daily decline since 1998. Thursday marked the company’s fourth-worst day on Wall Street since going public in 1984.
UnitedHealth’s precipitous drop rippled through the stock market. Fellow health insurers Humana (HUM) and Elevance Health (ELV) dropped 7.4% and 2.4%, respectively. And UnitedHealth, the priciest stock in the price-weighted Dow Jones Industrial Average, detracted an estimated 789 points from the blue-chip index, which fell 1.3%; if UnitedHealth stock hadn’t moved at all today, the Dow would have risen 262 points, or 0.7%.
UnitedHealth’s slump erased about $120 billion off its market capitalization, which puts it among the costliest stock routs of all time. It’s the kind of wealth-decimating drop that’s rarely seen outside of the tech sector, where corporate valuations are underpinned by growth expectations that can balloon and, in moments of crisis, pop. Meta (META), for example, became the first company to lose more than $100 billion in a single day in 2018 after the company—then called Facebook—reported disappointing quarterly revenue.
In defensive sectors like health care and consumer staples, companies usually lose that kind of market value over long periods of slow decline. Pharmacy giant Walgreens Boots Alliance (WBA) and cosmetics giant Estée Lauder (EL), for example, have each lost about $100 billion in value over the last 10 and 3 years, respectively, as they’ve struggled with slumping sales.
To be sure, UnitedHealth, with a $535 billion market cap, was the 14th largest company in the S&P 500 heading into Thursday’s session, giving it lots of market value to lose. Outside of the tech sector, only Berkshire Hathaway (BRK.B), Eli Lilly (LLY), Walmart (WMT), JPMorgan Chase (JPM), and Visa (V) were worth more before Thursday. Still, companies of UnitedHealth’s size often operate stable businesses that require a massive shock, like Covid-19, to suffer the kind of sell-off seen Thursday.
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