Wall Street is rolling out a new breed of ETFs with varying degrees of exposure — or lack thereof — to megacap technology shares, which are coming off a rout Wednesday that underscored worries around stretched valuations.
For investors looking for a rebound in the Big Tech cohort, which looked likely in early Thursday trading after Tesla announced blowout results, BlackRock is introducing the iShares Nasdaq Top 30 Stocks ETF (ticker QTOP) and the iShares Top 20 U.S. Stocks ETF (TOPT). These exchange-traded funds will track the biggest stocks in the tech-heavy Nasdaq 100 Index and the S&P 500, respectively. The tech giants are the largest members of both gauges.
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And for those eager to bypass the behemoths and still wager on equities gains, the world’s largest asset manager is launching the iShares Nasdaq-100 ex Top 30 ETF (QNXT), which gives exposure to the 31st-largest to the 100th-largest companies by market value in the benchmark.
The products debut at a key moment, with the so-called Magnificent Seven members starting to release quarterly earnings that stand to be decisive in determining the market’s next step. Tesla kicked off the group’s announcements late Wednesday. The rest — Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon.com, Nvidia and Meta Platforms — follow starting next week.
Investors are keenly awaiting the latest reading on when these firms’ AI investments will pay off. Since the launch of OpenAI’s ChatGPT in 2022 ignited the frenzy, trillions of dollars have poured into their shares. But Wednesday’s big selloff drove home the angst around whether investors’ expectations will prove too high.
The strength in tech stocks has “been driven largely by AI spending, but at some point that will need to translate into bottom line efficiencies for the end users, not just purchases that benefit the hardware and software providers,” said Steve Sosnick, chief investment strategist at Interactive Brokers. “We hope to learn a lot more about that during the upcoming earnings calls.”
An index tracking the Magnificent Seven is up more than 40% this year through Wednesday’s close, roughly double the advance for both the S&P 500 and the Nasdaq 100. The Roundhill Magnificent Seven ETF (MAGS) has swelled to about $770 million in assets, from $36 million at the start of the year.
Optimism about the prospects of artificial intelligence has been such a key pillar of market strength this year that BlackRock this week launched an ETF tracking AI firms globally.
Concentration worry
And yet there’s also concern around the concentrated nature of this year’s market rally, especially with Wall Street anticipating that the Magnificent Seven companies’ profit growth will slow on average. The stocks are projected to deliver average earnings growth of 19% in the third quarter, the smallest increase since the start of 2023, data compiled by Bloomberg Intelligence show.
For investors looking to strip out the influence of the biggest tech giants, this week also brought the debut of Defiance Large Cap ex-Mag 7 ETF (XMAG), which tracks the S&P 500 without the so-called Magnificent Seven stocks.
“Firms are trying to reduce that exposure by creating funds that don’t have exposure to Mag Seven,” said Mohit Bajaj, director of ETFs at WallachBeth Capital.
Investors have added nearly $24 billion into tech-related ETFs this year, most among the 12 sectors Bloomberg Intelligence tracks and quadruple the tally for all of last year.
Eventually, the market will broaden out, says Goldman Sachs Group Inc., paving the way for the equal-weighted S&P 500 to outperform the market cap-weighted benchmark in the next decade. For now, the equal-weighted gauge — one that gives Target Corp. as much clout as Microsoft — trails the regular S&P 500 by 6 percentage points year-to-date.
“No one complained on the ride up as these firms dominated the S&P 500 and Nasdaq,” said Amrita Nandakumar, president of Vident Asset Management. “Now, some investors are looking at their portfolios and wondering how much of those gains they would have to give back if the tech sector took a hit.”
