Even before Thursday鈥檚 steep stock market selloff in the wake of 鈥淟iberation Day鈥, which saw the so-called Magnificent 7 lose more than $800 billion in market capitalization, 2025 was not a good year for U.S. tech giants and their shareholders. In the first quarter, Nvidia and Apple, the world鈥檚 most valuable companies for large parts of the past 12 months, were the largest negative contributors to the S&P 500鈥檚 lackluster performance, dragging the index down 1.42 percentage points and 1.06 percentage points, respectively. That means, the two companies alone accounted for more than half of the index鈥檚 negative 4.27 percent return in the first quarter of the year, with other Mag 7 stocks such as Tesla, Microsoft, Amazon and Alphabet dragging the index down even further.
According to , senior index analyst at , the information technology and communication services sectors, i.e. most things tech, were responsible for 93.3 percent and 14.4 percent of the S&P 500鈥檚 total return of minus 4.3 percent in the first quarter. Excluding companies from these two sectors, the index's return would have been positive at 0.6 percent. Excluding just the Magnificent 7 would also have been enough to turn things around for the S&P 500, which would have returned 0.5 percent without the largest and most well-known tech companies in the world.
