Article content

Prem Watsa, the investor who heads Fairfax Financial Holdings Ltd. and foretold a drop in technology company shares two years ago, is now saying “I told you so.”

In his annual letter to shareholders, Watsa said he expects tech stocks from Twitter Inc. to Yelp Inc. to fall even further — as much as 90 per cent from their peak in the last two years. And the damage will extend to closely held startups, said Watsa, Fairfax’s chief executive officer.

We apologize, but this video has failed to load.

tap here to see other videos from our team. Try refreshing your browser, or The ‘unicorpse’ collapse is happening, and Prem Watsa predicts tech stocks will plummet even further Back to video

“The speculation in private high-tech companies (the most valuable of which are known as ‘unicorns’) has also ended with a thud,” he said in the letter issued Friday. “A friend of mine said the new name for these companies is ‘unicorpse’ as many of them cannot fund their losses internally for more than a few months and now have almost no access to external funding.”

In 2014, Watsa highlighted what he said was overvaluation of technology companies. In the past year, Twitter has dropped 64 per cent, Yelp is down 55 per cent and LinkedIn Corp. slipped 56 per cent. Watsa said he continues to support smartphone maker BlackBerry Ltd. and its CEO, John Chen. Fairfax is the second-largest investor in the Waterloo, Ontario-based company, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.