Stick a fork in it. Turn out the lights. Hasta la vista.
Say it anyway you'd like. The simple truth is the Magnificent Seven trade is over. Finito. Dead. The collective stock market outperformance of those seven tech icons -- Alphabet, Amazon.com, Apple, Meta Platforms, Nvidia, Microsoft, and Tesla -- is now a thing of the past.
The group may still do OK, and some of the individual stocks may even kill it, but the slam-dunk, set-it-and-forget-it, run-circles-around-the-market era of the Mag Seven is gone with the wind.
Recall that BofA Securities analyst Michael Hartnett coined the term Magnificent Seven in 2023, referring to the 1960 John Sturges Western gunslinger flick (an adaptation of Akira Kurosawa's 1954 film Seven Samurai). Since then those stocks have been lights out, up 76% in 2023, 47.5% in 2024, and 19.3% last year, beating the market every year, according to FactSet. Even with the group's performance down a bit last year, it contributed 42% of the S&P 500's total return, according to Matthew Smart, director of financial planning and portfolio analysis at WWM Investments. And the Mag Seven accounts for roughly one-third of the index's market cap.
We've seen this movie before. There was the Era of the Titans in the 1960s, when 10 companies, led by AT&T, General Motors, and Exxon Mobil, then called Standard Oil, accounted for nearly 30% of the market; the Nifty Fifty in the late 1960s and early 1970s; and the dot-com era, when mega tech stocks Cisco Systems, Microsoft, Intel, and Dell Technologies made up 27% of the market. Now the market is even more concentrated in fewer stocks.
True, folks predicted the demise of the Mag Seven's dominance last year, and it didn't happen. What's different now is that artificial intelligence has thickened the plot.
For starters, Microsoft, Amazon, Alphabet, and Meta (as well as Oracle) are spending jaw-dropping money on data centers and Nvidia chips. (This is less the case for Tesla and Apple -- and of course, Nvidia stands to benefit.) Peter Berezin, chief global strategist at BCA Research, notes that the "hyperscalers are set to spend $670 billion on capex in 2026, up from $410 billion in 2025 and $240 billion in 2024. Free cash flow is plummeting and has already turned negative for Oracle." This spending lowers the heretofore bountiful margins of the Mag Seven and makes their financials more opaque as they tap Wall Street for complex loan and funding strategies.
But wait, there's more -- which Berezin lays out in a recent paper, "AI Will Kill The Tech Monopolies." Tech companies, Berezin says, have historically generated profits from three sources: economies of scale, network effects, and proprietary technologies. "A lot of things that Mag Seven have enjoyed that have contributed to their profitability could now be threatened by AI," he argues.
First, AI subverts the tech giants' economies of scale by lowering the relatively high fixed costs of writing software, which had served as a protective moat for these companies. AI allows anyone to code. And the market has brutally punished software companies, with the iShares Expanded Tech-Software Sector exchange-traded fund down some 30% from its 2025 peak. On the variable cost side of the coin, spending on graphics processing units and data centers, as well as massive electricity bills, are sending tech companies' capital-light models the way of the dial-up modem.
As for network effects, which have greatly facilitated the likes of Facebook, YouTube, and LinkedIn, Berezin sees AI undermining this advantage in two ways. First, as AI bots populate these sites with fake images and get-rich schemes, audiences will tune out. Second, and even more concerning for the networks, is that AI systems could create a content feed layered on top of one's preferred social media. This would reduce the leverage that, say, YouTube has over an influencer, who could bypass that channel and post anywhere and get picked up by the AI algorithm.
When it comes to proprietary technology, Berezin argues that since much of what goes into creating AI systems is open source, it will be difficult for any one company to achieve a monopoly position. Incumbents that increasingly use AI as part of their core processes, like Microsoft and Alphabet, will lose monopoly power as it lessens the degree to which they are differentiated.
The markets seem to be waking up to all this. Mean reversion, never an "if" but a "when" proposition, may already be occurring. The Mag Seven is down 7.2% year to date, while the S&P 500 is off 0.89%. What would the S&P 500's performance be if you stripped out the Mag Seven? A proxy for that is the Defiance Large Cap ex-Mag 7 ETF, which I wrote about at its launch in October 2024 and which owns all the stocks in the S&P 500 except those seven. It's up 1.89% year to date.
"There are periods of time where the Mag Seven has taken a back seat, and this year is one of them," says Sylvia Jablonski, chief investment officer of Defiance ETFs.
Another non-Mag Seven play is the Invesco S&P 500 Equal Weight ETF, which mutes the outperformance of the Mag Seven (or any other stock) by equal-weighting each stock in the index and rebalancing every quarter. It's up 5.1% year to date.
Circling back to the 1960 Sturges movie, near the end of the flick a character remarks that the Magnificent Seven gunslingers were "like the wind, blowing over the land and passing on." So too, now, perhaps this latest version.
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