Tech stocks plunged yesterday after President Donald Trump announced in a “proclamation” that he was imposing a new 25% tariff on imports of computer chips from foreign countries. Every single one of the Magnificent Seven tech stocks was down by the closing bell yesterday. Meta suffered the worst, down 2.47%. Oracle (not in the Mag 7 but closely related) was down 4.29%, perhaps because it is the hyperscaler most dependent on imported chips for its AI data center business.
The S&P 500 closed down 0.53%.
However, S&P futures this morning were up 0.36% prior to the opening bell. Traders may be buoyed by the fact that there is a rotation away from the Mag 7 going on among investors in S&P 500 stocks. The index was dragged down yesterday largely because the Mag 7 performed so poorly. But the notional “equal weight” S&P 500 actually rose 0.41%. It’s up 3.62% this year while the normal index is up only 1.18%.
The implication is that traders are selling down the Mag 7 but buying most of the other stocks.
Deutsche Bank reported that 318 of the S&P 500 stocks went up yesterday. “There was still a lot of resilience among equities more broadly, as most of the S&P’s constituents still advanced … We saw more of the rotation pattern at play since the start of the year, with the small-cap Russell 2000 (+0.70%) hitting a new record as it outperformed the S&P 500 for the ninth session in a row. Indeed, the Russell 2000 is now up +6.84% YTD, in contrast to a -1.49% decline for the Mag-7,” Jim Reid and his team told clients this morning.
