investors pounded cloud software stocks on wednesday on concern that interest rates will rise for longer than previously expected initially stocks moved higher as the federal reserve announced it would increase its benchmark rate by 75 basis points but after powell began speaking at the central banks press conference equities reversed their gains and fell to session laws jerome powell chair of the federal reserve said data showed the ultimate level of rates will be higher than the us central bank had projected cloud stocks have been particularly sensitive to rising rates as investors prefer to own stocks with stronger current earnings that are less reliant on future growth billcom  twilio and cloudflare each lost 10 of their value on wednesday and are down at least 53 so far this year in 2022 central bankers in the us and abroad have repeatedly pushed up rates to stave off quickly rising prices of food energy and other goods for companies that pay cash dividends to investors such as ibm  which is the lone largecap tech stock up for the year the risk is lower but for moneylosing companies and many cloud stocks are not profitable the calculus is completely different valuations stem from the present value of future cash flows higher interest rates imply lower cash flows when interest rates were low particularly during the onset of covid19 in early 2020 cloud software ballooned in popularity and the stocks soared revenue at highgrowth companies doubled or even tripled year over year but sentiment has changed one gauge of cloud stocks the wisdomtree cloud computing fund is now down 51 for 2022 compared with a 110 rise in 2020 the sp 500 is down 21 this year on wednesday the wisdomtree fund fell 75 the sharpest decline since june the technologyheavy nasdaq composite index fell 34 while the sp 500 was down 25 the biggest loser was zoominfo  a provider of data for salespeople and other workers henry schuck zoominfos founder and ceo said on tuesday that despite delivering 46 yearoveryear revenue growth the company has run into challenges in connection with macroeconomic conditions as we made our way through q3 we began to see increased macro pressure on deals causing the level of deal review to increase and sales cycles to elongate further schuck said on a conference call with analysts on tuesday since this started very late in the quarter it only modestly impacted q3 results this elongation trend has continued into q4 and we do expect it to impact growth in the short term crowdstrike  qualtrics and other cloud software stocks have reported more scrutiny of deals in recent months on wednesday human resources software maker paycom announced its 33rd consecutive quarter of profitability the stock still fell about 8 in wednesdays selloff watch amazons cloud business is suffering from fed uncertainty says big techs alex kantrowitz