Perhaps it’s fitting that a year which started with meme stocks, bitcoin and SPACs soaring irrationally should end with the world’s biggest tech stocks suffering an extraordinary pasting.

Friday night brought a case in point. US e-signature giant DocuSign was worth $US40 billion ($57 billion) on Thursday, but a quarterly earnings report – in which it delivered in line for the September quarter but warned its revenue growth rate in the December quarter would slow from 40 per cent to 30 per cent – saw the stock plummet a staggering 42 per cent in a session. The company ended the week worth $US26 billion.