There were traders wearing “Dow 50,000” caps, and bright chyrons on CNBC. Attorney General Pam Bondi told lawmakers in Congress that they, too, should be making a big deal of the Dow Jones industrial average’s crossing 50,000 for the first time.
To Ms. Bondi, the Dow’s ascent was evidence that the Trump administration’s economic policies were working. She also noted that the S&P 500, another benchmark stock index, was at “almost 7,000” and that the Nasdaq Composite index, which is full of tech stocks, was “smashing records.”
“Americans’ 401(k)s and retirement savings are booming,” she said.
To many analysts and investors, however, the message the market is sending is far more ambiguous.
The Dow has yet to spend a day above 50,000 since Ms. Bondi’s appearance on Capitol Hill last week. The S&P 500 still has yet to close above 7,000, and the Nasdaq Composite last smashed its record high in October.
Major stock indexes have mostly been treading water for months, while shares in certain companies have been splashing about, erratically.
More than a fifth of the stocks in the S&P 500 have moved by 20 percent or more so far in 2026. Roughly 80 of those stocks have risen, while 40 of them have fallen, even as the main index has remained roughly flat. The Vix volatility index, known as Wall Street’s fear gauge, has steadily gone up this year, and oil prices are rising this week amid mounting threats that the United States will attack Iran.
The stock market sell-off has been led by sharp drops for software companies that are considered at risk of displacement by artificial intelligence. But investors have also been dumping many of the marquee tech names whose share prices have ridden a wave of A.I. exuberance. Investors are growing more worried that the reality of A.I. will fall short of the market’s lofty expectations.
“There are a lot of unanswered questions,” said Tiffany Wilding, an economist at the asset manager PIMCO, pointing to the labor market as one area where A.I.’s impact is hard to predict. “Whether A.I. will primarily be a substitute or a complement for labor, how quickly it diffuses across the economy and ultimately who wins versus loses are all very difficult to forecast.”
Shares of Apple, Meta, Broadcom, Alphabet, Advanced Micro Devices, Palantir and Microsoft, among the biggest winners from the A.I. trade, have all fallen this year. Nvidia, the engine of the stock market in recent years, has also sputtered, trading only slightly higher for the year through Thursday.
As investors have sought to diversify away from flagging enthusiasm for artificial intelligence, two sectors that have seen a sustained rise are energy and industrial stocks.
Consumer staples companies have also surged this year, with Clorox and Hershey rising more than 20 percent. Materials companies like Ball and Newmont have also risen over 20 percent. Dow Inc. is up 34 percent this year.
Energy companies are also rising, with Texas Pacific Land Corporation, a major landowner in the Texas oil patch, up roughly 70 percent this year.
President Trump made oil central to the terms of a deal with the Venezuelan government after the United States invaded the country and captured its leader. Oil prices rose sharply again this week as U.S. tensions with Iran intensified. Brent crude, the international oil benchmark, has gone up roughly $10 per barrel this year, to around $72.
“In our view, this might be a good time for investors to step off the A.I. hype train,” said Anthony Saglimbene, chief market strategist at Ameriprise.
This shift in the market has favored the Dow Jones industrial average, or “the Dow,” which is up 3 percent this year and 6.5 percent since October, outpacing the S&P 500. The Nasdaq Composite has turned negative for the year.
There is no doubt that the Dow remains incredibly culturally significant in American financial markets. In practice, however, Wall Street analysts, traders and economists place more emphasis on the S&P 500, the Nasdaq Composite and other stock benchmarks.
It comes down to three main reasons. First, very little money still tracks the Dow, with mutual funds preferring to tie their performance to other indexes. This makes the Dow less relevant to the average stockholder because other indexes will better reflect their own portfolio.
Second, a stock’s weighting in the Dow depends on its price, not the company’s overall value. That means small companies with high stock prices can have a bigger impact on the index than very large companies with low stock prices.
Finally, with a cohort of just 30 companies, the Dow is less reflective of the U.S. economy than other indexes.
Those 30 stocks do include some of the newer tech companies that have come to dominate the American economy, but the index is still largely made up of banks, industrial companies and other businesses more reflective of the economy as it once was, but not so much as it is now.
Still, they are the companies benefiting from a shift away from technology stocks and A.I.
Joe Rennison writes about financial markets, a beat that ranges from chronicling the vagaries of the stock market to explaining the often-inscrutable trading decisions of Wall Street insiders.
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