GuShiio.com ① Since the beginning of this year, the U.S. stock market’s rally is shifting from the “Big Seven” to more individual stocks. Investor interest is shifting to the financial and materials sectors, and the information technology sector is lagging behind;
② Goldman Sachs said that this year’s U.S. stock market rally will be more “micro-driven” and the stock price trend will be more related to the company’s own situation, and the DeepSeek impact is an important example of the acceleration of this trend.
Cailian News, February 22 (Editor Liu Rui)This year, the situation in U.S. stocks is quietly changing.
In the past two years, the “Big Seven” of U.S. stocks have been leading the rise of U.S. stocks, and apart from large technology stocks, few other stocks can outperform the index. howeverThis year, the gains of the “Big Seven” have been significantly weak, and the momentum of the rise has clearly spread to more other stocks.
In Goldman Sachs ‘view, starting this year, the rally in U.S. stocks will be more “micro-driven”, that is, stock price movements will be more related to the company’s own circumstances (rather than the overall environment). The market reaction after the birth of DeepSeek in China is an important example of accelerating this trend.
US stock market gains spread to other sectors
As of mid-February this year, 46% of the S & P 500 stocks had outperformed the S & P 500. This situation is completely different from the past two years-in 2023 and 2024, only 30% of the total stocks outperformed the S & P 500 index gains.
In fact, the situation over the past two years has been very unusual. In 2023 and 2024, as the “Big Seven” have always dominated the rally of U.S. stocks and have also had a siphon effect on U.S. stocks, the number of stocks that have underperformed the index in the past two years has increased to the largest since the late 1990s.
This year, this trend has shifted significantly. Since the beginning of this year, almost all of the gains of the “Big Seven” have failed. Except for META, the stock prices of the other six technology giants collectively underperformed the S & P 500 index. However, the number of stocks outperforming the index in the U.S. stock market has increased significantly.
Wall Street strategists believe that the current shift will clearly continue.Investors have changed the stocks they buy and expanded their investment beyond the Big Seven.
So far this year, the information technology (IT) sector is one of only three sectors lagging behind the S & P 500. At the same time, the financial and materials sectors were the best performing sectors.
However, a shift in investor interest does not mean a decline in risk sentiment. Bank of America recently released a survey of global fund managers in February, showing that the current allocation ratio of global fund managers to cash is only 3.5%, the lowest level in 15 years. This reflects that despite the weak gains of the “Big Seven” this year, the market’s risk appetite has not subsided.
The trend of individual stocks will be more divided
David Kostin, chief equity strategist at Goldman Sachs, recently wrote in a report that the current U.S. stock market is more “micro-driven,” which means that the company’s own specific details have a greater impact on stock market movements than overall factors.
Costin’s team pointed out thatRecently, the explosion of China’s AI model DeepSeek triggered a wave of selling in U.S. stocks, which is an important example of accelerating the transformation of U.S. stocks towards a “micro-driven” trend.
On January 27, U.S. Eastern Time, due to the emergence of DeepSeek, Nvidia’s share price plunged by 17%. AI software companies such as Apple, META and Salesforce closed higher on the day because investors believed that companies with META and other software could benefit from cheaper AI solutions.
“In the end, the market’s response was divisive rather than an indiscriminate collective decline, which also led to inconsistent movements in stocks,” Kostin wrote.
Kostin believes this creates opportunities for stock pickers who hope to find companies that will outperform the index in 2025. He listed a healthy economic growth environment, the continued expansion of the AI boom and policy uncertainty as key catalysts for the rally of individual stocks.
