The global stock rally hit a wall Tuesday, dragged lower by artificial intelligence and tech companies.
The S&P 500 was down more than 1% and the Nasdaq declined 2% by the middle of Tuesday afternoon. With less than two hours left in the trading day, the Russell 2000, which tracks smaller companies, had tumbled 1.4%.
Gold, a traditional safe haven for investors when markets are volatile or uncertain, had also dipped about 1.5%.
Within the S&P 500, technology was the worst-performing sector.
The largest publicly traded company in the world, Nvidia, dropped about 3.5%. With a market value of more than $4.85 trillion, Nvidia’s slide wiped more than $160 billion from the company’s market value.
Crypto also faced steep losses, with bitcoin plunging below $100,000 for the first time since June. The digital currency was down more than 7% as investors fled riskier assets like digital currencies.
International markets traced a similar path as benchmark indexes in Germany and France both fell nearly 1% on Tuesday. Asia Pacific markets also slid, with Australia and Hong Kong stock indexes falling around 1% during Tuesday trading. Stocks in Japan fell nearly 1.8%.
Earnings from defense darling Palantir appear to have helped trigger jitters among traders. The company’s shares, which have soared by more than 160% this year, tumbled by more than 8% despite beating Wall Street’s earnings and revenue expectations.
Michael Burry, known as “The Big Short” and who rose to fame over a bet against America’s housing market in 2008, also disclosed large bets against Nvidia and Palantir on Monday night.
Comments made overnight by the CEOs of two major investment banks also drew traders’ attention.
Goldman Sachs’ David Solomon and Morgan Stanley’s Ted Pick warned that stocks could be poised for a pullback.
“We should welcome the possibility that there would be drawdowns, 10% to 15%, that are not driven by some sort of macro cliff effect,” Pick said at Hong Kong’s global financial leaders summit.
Solomon, speaking at the same conference, said that “there are things that will change sentiment and will create drawdowns, or change the perspective on the growth trajectory, and none of us are smart enough to see them until they actually occur.”
But fears over stratospheric AI valuations have been the talk of Wall Street for most of the year. As those stocks continue to soar in value, they represent ever more of the value and momentum of key indexes like the S&P 500.
“AI related stocks have accounted for 75% of S&P 500 returns, 80% of earnings growth and 90% of capital spending growth since ChatGPT launched in November 2022,” a recent analysis from J.P. Morgan Asset Management found.
“The Magnificent 7 comprise over 30% of the S&P 500 — a level of concentration exceeding even that of the dot-com bubble,” Erwan Jacob, macro analyst with LSEG, wrote in a note Tuesday. The “Magnificent 7” companies are Apple, Amazon, Alphabet, Microsoft, Nvidia, Meta Platforms and Tesla.
“It remains unclear whether such expenditures will be met with corresponding revenues,” Jacob noted.
Still, this year the S&P 500 is up more than 16% overall, while the Nasdaq Composite, which more closely tracks the biggest tech firms, remains in the green by 24%.
Yet experts say that a pullback is not always cause for concern.
“On average, the [S&P 500] experiences three drawdowns of between 5% and 10% each year,” Jeff Buchbinder, chief market strategist at LPL Financial, wrote during a short sell-off in August 2024. “Corrections of 10–20% are also quite common, having occurred once per year on average.”
Meanwhile, the dollar index, a measure of the strength of the U.S. dollar against a basket of foreign currencies such as the yen, pound sterling and euro, was slightly higher, rising to its best level in about three months.
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