Magnificent 7’s Stock Market Dominance Shows Signs of Cracking

(Bloomberg) — To beat the market in recent years, many investors applied a simple strategy: Load up on the biggest US technology stocks.

It paid handsomely for a long time. But last year, it didn’t. For the first time since 2022, when the Federal Reserve started raising interest rates, the majority of the Magnificent 7 tech giants performed worse than the S&P 500 Index. While the Bloomberg Magnificent 7 Index rose 25% in 2025, compared with 16% for the S&P 500, that was only because of the enormous gains by Alphabet Inc. and Nvidia Corp.

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Many Wall Street pros see that dynamic continuing in 2026, as profit growth slows and questions about payoffs from heavy artificial intelligence spending rise. So far they’ve been right, with the Magnificent 7 index up just 0.5% and the S&P 500 climbing 1.8% to start the year. Suddenly stock picking within the group is crucial.

“This isn’t a one-size-fits-all market,” said Jack Janasiewicz, lead portfolio strategist at Natixis Investment Managers Solutions, which has $1.4 trillion in assets. “If you’re just buying the group, the losers could offset the winners.”

The three-year bull market has been led by the tech giants, with Nvidia, Alphabet, Microsoft Corp. and Apple Inc. alone accounting for more than a third of the S&P 500’s gains since the run began in October 2022. But enthusiasm for them is cooling as interest in the rest of the S&P 500 rises.

With Big Tech’s earnings growth slowing, investors are no longer content with promises of AI riches — they want to start seeing a return. Profits for the Magnificent 7 are expected to climb about 18% in 2026, the slowest pace since 2022 and not much better than the 13% rise projected for the other 493 companies in the S&P 500, according to data compiled by Bloomberg Intelligence.

“We’re already seeing a broadening of earnings growth and we think that’s going to continue,” said David Lefkowitz, head of US equities at UBS Global Wealth Management. “Tech is not the only game in town.”

One source of optimism is the group’s relatively subdued valuations. The Magnificent 7 index is priced at 29 times profits projected over the next 12 months, well below the 40s multiples earlier in the decade. The S&P 500 is trading at 22 times expected earnings, and the Nasdaq 100 Index is at 25 times.