Nasdaq takes biggest fall as stocks finish lower

new york » U.S. stocks fell Friday, with the Nasdaq composite sliding the most in two months, after large technology stocks fromGoogle toYahoo plunged as investors sold the bull market’s biggest winners.

GoogleClassAshares sank 4.6 percent in the biggest drop since October 2012. Face- book lost 4.6 percent, bringing its two-day slide to 9.5 percent. Yahoo declined 4.2 percent to the lowest since November. An index of biotechnology stocks plunged 4.1 percent. GrubHub surged 31 percent in its trading debut.

The Nasdaq lost 2.6 percent to 4,127.73. The Standard& Poor’s 500 sank 1.3 percent to 1,865.09 after earlier rising to an all-time high. The Dow Jones industrial average dropped 159.84 points, or 1 percent, to 16,412.71.

“This has been in the making for a few weeks,” Rick Fier, director of equity trading at Conifer Securities inNewYork, said in a phone interview. “Managers were positioned very heavily last year with the winners. Today is kind of like the panic day that they couldn’t stand it anymore, and now they’re just puking these names.”

The Nasdaq index fell 0.7 percent in the past five days after losing 2.8 percent the previous week. The gauge is down 1.2 percent in 2014. It rose 38 percent last year. Equities had climbed to records earlier Friday after a government report showing employers added to payrolls last month.

All but nine of the 121 stocks in the Nasdaq Biotechnology index dropped, led by a 27 percent slide in HalozymeTherapeutics.