S&P 500 finds itself once again unable to surmount the 7,000 threshold
Another week when “It could’ve been worse” passes for a declaration of victory on Wall Street, as traders navigate mini-crashes rolling through one sector after the next and investors try to draw nourishment from the relative outperformance of a majority of stocks. The S & P 500 was about flat last week and finished at a level first reached 112 calendar days ago, that late-October moment the market was excitedly pricing in a cheery backdrop of an economic upturn augmented by Federal Reserve “insurance” rate cuts and energized by an AI investment boom that promised more creation than destruction. .SPX 6M mountain S & P 500, 6 months It’s now a market prompting more pointed questions and suggesting only equivocal answers: -Is there truly more downside to existing businesses than upside to new ones in the self-perpetuating AI expansion, as some of the bloodthirsty selling in software, data services, financial-advisory and logistics stocks suggests? -Given the massive growth in 2026 AI capex plans relative to expectations just a month ago, why are Nvidia shares sitting where they were six months ago as its forward P/E ratio (23.3) sinks to its slimmest premium to the market since 2015? -Can the relative struggle in consumer-exposed stocks compared to traditionally defensive staples be dismissed as a mere lull phase in cyclical appetites or is it a festering concern? -If deregulation and reinvigorated capital-markets trends are core beliefs about the 2026 setup, why are JPMorgan shares back to last summer’s prices and why is Goldman Sachs down 6% in the month since its stellar earnings? -Should investors take heart in the fact that with all the localized pain and violent whipsaws inside the market — and its repeated inability to surmount the 7,000 threshold — the S & P 500 has found support three times this year before exceeding a 3% pullback? Broadening market John Kolovos, chief technical strategist at Macro Risk Advisors, observed: “Two months ago, if you told me software would be down 30%, I would have assumed the S & P 500 was down at least 10%. Same with Netflix, Microsoft, or bitcoin, down 30% plus. If you told me staples and value outperformed, I would have said the S & P had to be lower. That’s not what happened. The index is flattish, spinning its wheels, constantly shifting internally, with a lot of rotation creating dispersion but little directional movement at the index level.” One person’s resilience is another’s precarity, but so far broad pain has been avoided (or deferred). The equal-weighted S & P 500 is fully redeeming the groundswell of enthusiasm for a “broadening” market, so far this year outpacing the market-cap-weighted benchmark by nearly six percentage points. Here’s how the latest run of glory by the median stock looks on a 30-year scale. For those excited about the precedent of the early-2000s, when the broader list surged in relative terms after a mega-cap-tech-dominated mania, note that most of that outperformance in the century’s first three years came from large growth stocks imploding rather than stellar absolute gains by the rank and file. When interpreting the rapid shifts in sector leadership in the past six weeks, it’s hard to disentangle genuine real-time revaluing of corporate prospects from somewhat typical early-year mean-reversion action in which consensus trades get tested and under-owned groups see mechanical rebounds. There were significant tactical market peaks in January or February in 2018, 2020, 2022 and 2025, all of them involving momentum reversals and forced rotations as an aggravating factor. Nick Savone on Morgan Stanley’s institutional equity desk, summed it up well in a weekend Global Reflections writeup: “Markets occasionally demand an honest reassessment – and this week showed that. Net leverage snapped lower, short adds outpaced long sales, and some of the most crowded factor tilts – momentum, small caps, retail favorites – suddenly looked less comfortable. When exposure overlaps this tightly, it doesn’t take a macro shock to cause turbulence. Sometimes all you need is a narrative shift.” It is indeed relevant and beneficial that the macro picture has not materially eroded. Last week’s delayed monthly jobs report and fresh CPI data could have moved in a stagflationary direction, but instead came in better than feared, in a way that had the Wall Street Journal declaring the long-promised and oft-doubted soft landing achieved. In broad terms, global markets are maneuvering to price in a reflationary impulse, higher nominal growth, fiscal looseness, redundant demand for real assets as regional stockpiles are built and a preference of the marginal buyer to favor non-U.S. assets. Corporate earnings trends have also not been an outright source of concern to this point. The S & P 500 collectively is tracking for low- to mid-teens profit growth in the fourth quarter, surpassing consensus forecasts by several percentage points. While supportive of the market, it’s notable that reported results have run way ahead of expectations for several quarters in a row now, which means the market simply assumes such margins of victory. Perhaps no wonder, then, that the S & P 500 is trading at levels it saw during the last lopsidedly strong reporting period three months ago? Rotation to capital intensive Within the U.S. stock market, in the absence of a profound macro scare or corporate stress, the AI-impact panic has spurred a ferocious and desperate-looking migration away from virtual assets to physical value. Goldman Sachs here plots the relative valuation of asset-light over asset-heavy companies, compressing toward zero. It’s possible that this rush away from the very kinds of high-return, wide-moat, information-economy businesses and into Old Economy touch-and-feel products is both overplayed in the short term while also being informative about the evolving risk-reward tradeoffs. The $700 billion to be spent this year on AI-capex by the half-dozen biggest tech players has forced investors to think big about the implications. If such a sum mobilized over 12 months has any rational basis, it will have to kill or at least threaten wide expanses of the corporate landscape. This sent the market hunting for a variety of middleman companies that parlayed a core of proprietary information into layered ancillary services and constant price increases. Many of these companies won status among investors as “compounders,” their stocks held complacently by traditional growth investors. Enterprise software, yes, but also financial-transaction processors and rating agencies, real-estate brokers and freight-logistics firms. It doesn’t all make sense in detail and buying opportunities are surely being created here. But can such groups regain the benefit of the doubt and recapture their former premium valuations quickly? Also on the market’s mind: As healthy as a broader market might seem, it’s rare for a bull market to execute a radical leadership change at full gallop. Sure, the AI enthusiasm continues to flow, but only through the narrow channels of Alphabet shares and memory-storage stocks. Let’s not dismiss the opportunity that the mood can shift back from Old Economy to the AI complex more broadly at some point, however. Just last summer, the big perceived risk was the market credulously bidding up everything AI and perhaps building an unstable bubble. This is close to the opposite of the current mode. And entering 2026, hazards included ebullient investor sentiment, stretched valuations and crowding into the “cyclical acceleration” theme; those extremes now been reduced if not fully neutralized. The “think big” imperative also applies to anticipated new supply of AI-specific equity. The market is aware that the largest-ever privately held companies are lining up to float IPOs of small stakes at valuations exceeding what they’ve already achieved with venture-capital, sovereign-wealth and strategic-corporate investors. If the likes of OpenAI and SpaceX/xAI truly wish to target $1 trillion-plus equity values at a time when tech share-buyback firepower is waning, the public’s willingness to bless such towering capitalizations will surely be tested. Or perhaps the persistent selling-down of Magnificent 7 stocks is the market’s way of making room for such goliaths to stomp their way into the indexes?
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