Magnificent Seven Hit All Time High
After a brutal early 2026 selloff that left the most powerful stocks in the market looking finished, something shifted. The forces that once drove the biggest rally in stock market history may be waking back up.
Meta (NASDAQ: META | META Price Prediction) was so far behind in the AI game that investors viewed it as a second-tier stock. Tesla (NASDAQ: TSLA) collapsed amid concerns that US EV sales had dropped and would not recover. Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL) had no standout product. Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) lost ground to OpenAI after a failed partnership. The Magnificent Seven, which had driven one of the largest rallies in stock market history, no longer mattered. In early March, a proxy for the group, which is the Roundhill Magnificent Seven ETF, was in shambles. At the start of 2026, the group accounted for almost 40% of the S&P 500’s market cap.
Meta staged a huge rally as its Muse AI agent topped the App Store downloads list. The personal agent is just what consumers need. It is a new and well-accepted product in the race with leaders like OpenAI. News of its success drove Meta 11% higher.
Apple’s new iPhone release was not a home run, but the products, including the foldable iPhone Duo, were well received. It reminded investors that Apple still controls the consumer electronics world. AI may be important, but so are the smartphones people buy it on.
Not every stock in the group has rallied. People still worry that Tesla is not just an EV company. Elon Musk says robotics and AI will drive it to remarkable revenue. In decades, he has argued, there will be hundreds of millions of robots, made for factories and to be personal assistants to humans.
Microsoft and Amazon have made tepid, but largely successful cases that their massive cloud businesses will be a route to their versions of AI. Alphabet has made an even better case with the success of its Gemini product, which has gotten wide adoption and will power the AI core of the new iPhone. And Google’s search product remains successful, just as Amazon’s e-commerce business does.
Nvidia (NASDAQ: NVDA), the market-cap leader, is the arms merchant to almost the entire AI industry. It continues to swap cash for ownership in companies that then use that money to buy its chips. Critics have questioned the arrangement, but it works.
The Wall Street Journal said it best: “Surging tech shares lifted the Nasdaq composite to a record close, and left AI-safety fears in the dust.”
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Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.
McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.
His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.
A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.
TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.
McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.
