Your feed is full of Broadcom. The stock chart is a staircase, the AI headlines keep coming, and Hock Tan keeps guiding higher. You didn’t buy any. You feel behind.
You’re not.
From December 31, 2025 through July 10, 2026, Broadcom (NASDAQ:AVGO | AVGO Price Prediction) returned 15.99% on a year-to-date basis. Over that same window, the Invesco QQQ Trust (NASDAQ:QQQ), the ETF tracking the NASDAQ-100 index, returned 18.10%. The boring basket beat the hot ticker.
The Math, in Dollars
Anchor it to real money. A $10,000 stake in AVGO on the last trading day of 2025 was worth roughly $11,599 as of July 10, 2026. The same $10,000 in QQQ was worth about $11,810. Different route, better destination, one-stock risk skipped.
Zoom out and Broadcom is still the sexier chart. Over the trailing twelve months AVGO is up 46.3% against QQQ at 30.62%. But the story most retail investors are telling themselves right now is a 2026 story, and in the 2026 story the index quietly won.
Same Tide, Different Boats
The reason both charts point up is the same reason: the AI infrastructure buildout. Broadcom’s Q2 fiscal 2026 revenue jumped 47.9% year over year to $22.187 billion, with AI semiconductor revenue alone hitting $10.80 billion, up 143% year over year. Management guided Q3 AI revenue to $16.0 billion, more than 200% YoY growth. CEO Hock Tan called it “record revenue, operating profit and free cash flow” driven by custom AI accelerators and networking silicon for hyperscalers.
That check being written by the hyperscalers doesn’t land only at one address. It lands across the entire NASDAQ-100 mega-cap tech complex: the chip designers, the foundry customers, the cloud platforms buying the gear, the software layer running on top of it. QQQ owns that theme as a basket of roughly 100 of the largest non-financial companies listed on Nasdaq. Owning the basket captured whichever name printed the loudest AI number.
The Trade-Off You Skipped
Yes, Broadcom holders had the higher-conviction ride. They also had to sit through it. AVGO’s beta is 1.462 and its 52-week range runs from $267.60 to $494.18. Reddit sentiment on the name whipped from bullish 65 around the Apple deal in early June to very-bearish 18 by June 23. That is the price of admission for a single stock, even a good one.
And single-stock risk isn’t hypothetical. On the July 9, 2026 tape, one NYSE-listed hot name, Rackspace (NYSE:RXT) dropped 33.59% in a single session on 59 million shares of volume. Different company, different story, same lesson: concentration cuts both ways. QQQ spreads that risk across its full basket for an expense ratio of roughly 0.20%. You gave up the top of the trade to skip the bottom of it.
Process Over Picks
This is the quiet argument for indexing the theme instead of chasing the ticker. You don’t need to have called Broadcom’s AI accelerator ramp, timed the Apple partnership, or held through the mid-June sentiment swoon to have participated. You needed exposure to the force behind all of it, and you needed to leave it alone.
Broadcom may keep running. It may not. If you’re kicking yourself for missing AVGO in 2026, look at your QQQ line again. The tide did the work. Owning a process that captures tides beats guessing which fish will jump highest, and it costs a lot less sleep.
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