The Magnificent Seven spent 92% of 2026 trailing the S&P 500. Barclays did the math. Someone had to.
Retail traders who bought the dip in January are now buying the dip in February. And March. And April. They'll buy the dip in December too because pattern recognition requires a functioning prefrontal cortex.
The cohort that spent three years convincing everyone it was immune to economic gravity suddenly discovered gravity. Turns out selling cloud storage and targeted ads doesn't protect you when actual money costs actual money. Interest rates matter. Who knew. Besides everyone.
Big Tech lagging the broader market is like finding out the popular kid in high school now sells timeshares. It happened gradually. Then all at once. Then retail bought more calls.
Barclays calls the performance lackluster. That's British for "holy sh*t this sucked." When a bank that survived the Napoleonic Wars calls your year lackluster, you've had a bad year.
The same stocks that made every amateur with a Robinhood account feel like Warren Buffett now make them feel like Warren Buffett in 1999. Except Warren Buffett in 1999 sat out the bubble and looked smart later. Retail sat in the bubble and added on margin.
Meta. Apple. Amazon. Alphabet. Microsoft. Tesla. Nvidia. Seven companies. Ninety-two percent of the year spent losing to an index that includes Walgreens. Let that marinate.
Every financial journalist spent the last three years explaining why Big Tech could only go up. Network effects. Moats. Pricing power. AI revolution. They wrote the same article 47 times with different headlines. Now they're writing the same article about why Big Tech is going down. Same journalist. Same confidence. Different direction.
Somewhere right now a guy who bought Nvidia at the February peak is explaining to his wife why they can't afford groceries but they can definitely afford to average down.
Photo by Brecht Corbeel on Unsplash
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