Hedge funds are bailing on Magnificent 7 stocks
Positioning in the group recently sank to fresh one-year lows, according to Goldman Sachs.
The megacap tech stocks underpinning the bull market in US equities — Apple, Nvidia, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Meta, and Tesla — are increasingly out of favor among the hedge-fund community.
Scott Rubner, managing director for global markets at Goldman Sachs, flagged that hedge-fund positioning in the so-called “Magnificent 7” stocks is at fresh one-year lows, citing data from the bank’s prime brokerage.
“Hedge funds have (relatively) left this set of the market for 1) other AI plays and 2) bigger Trump beneficiaries,” he wrote in a note to clients on Friday.
Interestingly, the Mag 7 cohort as a whole has outperformed the S&P 500 since November 5, but that’s all down to one stock: Tesla.
For passive investors in the S&P 500, this dynamic might be a bit concerning since this group makes up over 30% of the index. We need only to look back to mid-July to see that when investors rotate out of Big Tech into something else (in that instance, small caps), that shift can often be a net negative for the US benchmark gauge.
The good news is that, assuming Goldman’s prime brokerage data is a fair representation of hedge-fund activity at large, it looks like this exodus has taken place without too much in the way of damage at the index level, with the S&P 500 less than 1% below its record closing high as of midday Friday.
