Tech Stocks Today: After the AI Swoon, Tech Still Sways the Whole Market

The selloff did not shrink tech's grip on the market; it proved it. Even with a steep pullback in AI names, the US stock market is poised to keep relying on technology shares, Reuters reported Monday, and investors are on guard for the obstacles that could trip up the trade in the coming weeks. A month-long swoon in technology and AI-related stocks culminated this week in the biggest one-day drop for the S&P 500 technology sector in over six years, driven in part by investor concern that Democratic victories in the midterm elections would lead to slower data-center spending. Yet tech remains by far the biggest sector in the S&P 500, at greater than 35 percent of the index as of Thursday's close, and its share of the index's market capitalization remains above the level it reached at the height of the Internet bubble in 2000. "Because so much of technology is AI-sensitive, it's going to have an impact on the entire sector, and that sector carries so much weight within the S&P 500," Robert Pavlik, senior portfolio manager at Dakota Wealth Management, told Reuters. "So weakness in AI is going to drag down tech, which drags down the S&P 500."

The longer arc is why the weight persists: the sector has gained more than 200 percent since the bull market began in October 2022, nearly double the S&P 500's gain, and some of the biggest AI winners are still logging large year-to-date gains despite their slides — Sandisk up about 250 percent in 2026, Dell Technologies about 160 percent, and Micron Technology 140 percent. As stocks rebounded somewhat on Friday, the S&P 500 was last up nearly 8 percent for the year, with the tech sector up about 11 percent. "If somebody is in a profit-taking mode, there are still profits to be had," Chuck Carlson, chief executive at Horizon Investment Services, told Reuters.

The swoon has also reset the price of admission: tech's forward price-to-earnings ratio fell to 17.1 as of Thursday, according to LSEG Datastream, after rising above 32 in October 2025 — and at 17.9 for the overall S&P 500, this week marked the first time since 2017 that tech's multiple has fallen below the broader market's. "We are moving toward a situation where a little good news could go a long way," Keith Lerner, chief investment officer at Truist Advisory Services, said in a note. The coming catalysts are named and dated: sentiment around Anthropic's planned IPO, CoreWeave's results on Tuesday, Nvidia on November 17 and Dell on November 24, against a macro backdrop of the war with Iran and next week's consumer price index. For New York's trading desks, the arithmetic is the story: when one sector is more than a third of the index, there is no such thing as a tech-only selloff.