In nearly 30 years, the S&P 500 hasn’t had a day like this

The S&P 500 had its worst session since the end of April, falling 0.9% as the Magnificent Seven proved a misnomer — at least for today.

A soft US CPI inflation print catalyzed a violent rotation out of what had been working this year into what has been lagging, with interest-rate sensitive sectors also performing well.

This was a day for the record books.

Breadth within the S&P 500 was exceptional: nearly 400 stocks rose. The S&P 500 has never suffered a loss this large with that many stocks moving higher versus lower in data going back to October 1996.

The Russell 2000 Index of small-cap stocks had its best day since November, up 3.5%, while the Bloomberg Magnificent Seven Index of tech titans fell 4.2%, its worst day since October 2022. The performance gap between the two was the largest going back to at least April 2015.

Lower-than-expected inflation fueled a rally in bonds, helping make real estate the best-performing S&P sector ETF. Its 2.7% gain was the biggest for the sector all year. Utilities, another rate-sensitive pocket of the market, gained 1.8%.

The SPDR S&P Homebuilders ETF did even better, up a whopping 5.9% in its best day since October 2022.

The tech sector ETF was trounced, down 2.5%, with communication services and consumer discretionary also off more than 1%. Nvidia, Tesla, Microsoft, Apple, Google, Amazon, and Meta all fell more than 2%.

There were also some earnings stories that weighed on the market as well. In particular, Delta fell 4% after reporting quarterly results that disappointed and stirred fears of industry-wide overcapacity even amid high travel.