Don’t be fooled by Big Tech stocks’ rise. There could be more pain, spelling additional trouble for the S&P 500.
There’s no denying that these stocks are on the up again, for now.Apple (AAPL),Meta Platforms (FB),Amazon.com (AMZN),Netflix (NFLX),Alphabet (GOOGL),Microsoft (MSFT), and Tesla (TSLA) have all risen between 3% and 10% from the low points reached in their recent pullbacks. Stocks had been sliding from mid-November until late last week, as the Federal Reserve signaled that it might move sooner than planned to halt the bond purchases it has used to prop up the economy during the pandemic.
Less money moving into long-dated Treasury bonds allows their prices to fall, all else being equal, pushing yields on the debt higher. Those higher interest rates reduce the current, discounted value of future profits—and investors in these tech giants are counting on big profits many years down the line.
But it’s far from certain that the pain for Big Tech stocks is over.
The Fed’s change in stance will make gains hard to come by for Big Tech stocks. Central banks effectively print money to buy bonds, so the more they purchase,, the bigger their balance sheets become. Less bond buying means slower balance-sheet growth, which makes a difference for Big Tech stocks, according to Bank of America.
Its data show a close correlation between the size of central-bank balance sheets and Big Tech valuations. And the aggregate size of the balance sheets of the Fed, the European Central Bank, the Bank of Japan, and the Bank of England has flattened out at about $25 trillion, while the market capitalization of the Big Tech stocks has continued to rise.
The problem is that based on history, a central-bank balance sheet of about $25 trillion implies an the aggregate market capitalization for those Big Tech stocks of around $9 trillion, according to Bank of America’s data. That would mean a decline of about 20% from the current $11.3 trillion.
A separate indicator also hints that the best of Big Tech’s outperformance may be over. The group’s gains have outpaced the S&P 500’s by so much recently that its total market cap is now the highest portion of the S&P 500’s total value since August 2020. That, of course, was just before the Big Tech stocks all experienced corrections, or declines of at least 10%.
Before that, the last time Big Tech was so large compared to the broader market was in 2000, before the dotcom bubble burst.
A poor performance by Big Tech could drag the S&P 500 down. The index is weighted according to market cap, so when the biggest stocks fall, it makes more of a difference than when smaller companies decline. If the S&P 500 is to post solid gains from here, it will need the help of stocks outside of Big Tech.
That is also far from a certainty. The percentage of New York Stock Exchange-listed stocks that are trading above their 200-day moving averages was just under 50% as of Monday, compared with close to 100% during the best times, according to Morgan Stanley. If so many stocks keep trading at such low prices, the S&P 500 should fall about 8% from its current level, the bank’s data show.
One positive is that the S&P 500 has risen about 4% in the four trading days since the low of its recent pullback. This week, the vast majority of stocks on the index have participated in the rally.
That is a good sign, but investors will need to see the index stage a broad rally for longer in order to have confidence in the gains.