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

Happy Friday. Happy New Year's Eve. And welcome to Tech Check. I'm George Rapozo with Kayla Taushie.

Neely Patel, editor-in-chief of The Verge and host of the Decoder podcast, joins us once again this hour.

To help us close out the final trading session of the year. Today, we are breaking down

what was the biggest story in tech for 2021. The big, well, they got bigger and growth names

experienced a meltdown to end the year. Plus, 2021 was a banner year for SPACs and IPOs, even

direct listings, but also some of its worst performing. Today, the last SPAC of

2021 hits the street. And finally, wondering if it's too late to jump into semis with names like

Nvidia up nearly 130% year to date, we will tell you where you should put your money in the new

year. Kayla, happy early New Year. This is about as much celebrating as I'm doing since we're all in quarantine over here. I know. I know we have a lot of salutations, old langs sign, good riddins. 2021 was not at all like we thought it was going to be at the beginning of the year. But hey, we'll take it. We'll go into 2022 and we will start fresh. But we're going to start the show, Dee, with a look at the wild

ride for tech stock we've seen this year. Names like Apple, Microsoft, Google, and Tesla saw big gains

driving their trillion-dollar market caps even higher, as you mentioned. Apple now just as stones throw away from $3 trillion.

And while growth players once pandemic darlings across the tech landscape take a hit,

take a look at this. Zoom is off almost 60% from its highs of the year. Peloton down sharply. Splunk.

Others are following down double digits as well.

Splunk down nearly 32 percent. Peloton down 76 percent. And given the surge in COVID cases across

the globe, the outlook for many of these stocks is mixed. But even with ARC down 22 percent year-to-date,

Kathy Wood's, Kathy Wood is bullish.

She wrote on Twitter, quote, in our view, fears of inflation will give way to confusion

and fears of recession during the next three to six months.

If so, the rapid growth rates of truly innovative companies, many of their equities maligned

this year, should be rewarded handsomely.

...