The Financial Post reports in its Tuesday edition that the Magnificent Seven tech giants -- Apple, Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia and Tesla -- moved in unison through much of last year, driving the brunt of the market's gains and reigning until very recently as the S&P 500's biggest firms. A Bloomberg dispatch to the Post says that the relentless demand for the group's shares drew parallels to the speculative frenzy surrounding Internet stocks at the turn of the century. However, the seven have diverged in 2024 as investors soured on the outlook for several firms -- signalling that the froth around the cohort may have diminished. Robust profits from some of the tech behemoths have also brought down sky-high valuations. They remain relatively stretched, but they are still well below prior peaks.
For example, the Magnificent Seven stocks trade near their average price-to-earnings ratio since 2015, data compiled by Bloomberg show.
The largest five S&P 500 stocks today trade at less than half the multiples of the top stocks in early 2000 -- Intel, Cisco Systems, Microsoft and Dell. Valuations are also contained across technology shares in areas including artificial intelligence and robotics.
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