European markets lower; tech stocks down 2.4% following declines on Wall Street

LONDON — European stocks tumbled in morning deals Wednesday, following losses on Wall Street and in Asia-Pacific markets.

The pan-European Stoxx 600 index was 0.9% lower at 9:34 a.m. in London, with all sectors in the red. Technology stocks dropped 2.36% as travel stocks shed 1.4%.

U.S. stock futures were lower early Wednesday.

The declines stateside prompted Asia-Pacific markets to plunge overnight, with Japan’s Nikkei 225 down 3.19%, leading losses in Asia, while the broad based Topix was down 2.79%.

“I don’t think we’ve got clarity as to whether the [U.S.] economy’s doing any more than slowing its growth rate, or earnings are really falling at an index level in a meaningful way,” Freddie Lait, chief investment officer at Latitude Investment Management, told CNBC’s “Squawk Box Europe” on Wednesday.

“To me, it’s much more about momentum and technicals than it is about fundamentals at the moment, and that’s frankly what led the market last month in that big crash and recovery that we saw. It’s not individual, long-term, fundamental investors driving these markets anymore.”

Lait added, “It’s the momentum traders, it’s the macro traders, it’s the high-frequency traders, it’s all the other players in the market that have different reasons to be trading stocks [on] shorter time frames or different kinds of investment philosophies that tend to cause these moves to be larger than they would have been in the past. So I’m not trying to rationalize it.”