I'm Carl Kintanilla. You're listening to CNBC's Tech Check. Our show is live weekdays at 11 a.m. Eastern. Listen in.

Good Monday morning and welcome to Tech Check.

I'm Deirdreboza with John Fort and Julia Borsen.

Carl has the morning off.

Today, geopolitical tensions and the possibility of war in Ukraine lead to volatility.

The NASDAQ recovering from pre-market losses after Russian officials say compromise is still possible. Plus, we'll take a look at the impact on chips as we get an

upgrade of Micron and a downgrade of Texas instruments. And then tech talks a big game,

Cryptos, EV, and the Metaverse dominating Super Bowl ads last night, John.

Yeah, and we will start with the feed today, joined by Plexo Capital Managing Partner, Lowe, Tony, and we'll get to the chips and what to expect when a couple of gig economy companies report later this week. But first, let's get to the New York Stock Exchange, our Mike Santoli, taking a look at some of the macro factors shaking up markets this morning. Hey, Mike. Hey, John. Yeah, it seems like a lot of the same pressure points that are being applied to the overall stock market, obviously hitting tech. Tech, though, in a little bit more of a vulnerable position because it is further off of its highs. Just take a look at sort of the field position of the NASDAQ 100 ETF here. It's about 15% off its record high.

And what I always like to point out is just how far back in time we're also going pretty much to early July or late June even.

So basically almost eight months.

So we've kind of skimmed a lot of off the top in terms of valuations right here.

Yields are up today, which is kind of interesting, even though they're not at new highs, and yet you have a slight NASDAQ outperformance. So those rules, they're not necessarily a day-to-day bellwether of what's going to happen with these markets. I think the yield story with tech has been slightly overplayed. But take a look within technology, how on a year-to-day basis,

so this is just, you know, the last seven weeks or whatever it is. Really not a lot of

differentiation. Even though semis have been the outperformer for a longer period of time coming

in, software has actually struggled much more. You see them all kind of pulling into the same

zone. I think this is when a market is under stress. It's in a correction, and it's sort of reacting to itself and people trying to figure out if tactically things have gotten oversold enough, have we taken enough of the valuation out of the big guys for them to be on more balanced footing from here on out. Yeah, and Mike, we've had a lot of the big earnings.

We still have some to come. But I wonder if you can kind of discern what is going to be driving markets more in the week ahead. Is it Ukraine and Russian the possibility of what happens there? Or is it the Fed and rate hikes? I think there's going to be a ton of Fed speak. We know that, right? That's all scheduled. And my guess would be that on balance, it's going to be slightly less hawkish than Jim Bullard, who we've heard from over the past several days, including this morning, who's kind of holding to this idea of being much more aggressive quickly. So if I'm sort of putting that on one side of the scale, it says that's probably going to get no worse, at least rhetorically than we had before. We'll see what yields do in response to that. Geopolitical stuff, I think, to me, is more just an exacerbating factor on all this, and it's mostly transmitted through energy prices. And you see them coming off a little bit today. So clearly nobody wants to have any kind of a conflict, but usually that's not the long-term swing factor for what markets do.

It often is just a little bit of a quick little aggravating element to what's already

been going on in markets.

All right, Mike.

Thank you.

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