Quick Read – The Nasdaq 100’s 7% pullback from highs reflects investors fleeing crowded semiconductor stocks, not a broad market crash. – SpaceX, Anthropic, and OpenAI IPOs could drain liquidity from existing tech names, fueling a volatile second half of 2026. – Microsoft’s…
7x forward P/E makes it a rare quality bargain while hot AI trades grow increasingly expensive. – Whenever the Nasdaq 100 slides more than 4% in a single day, as it did on Friday, it can feel like the stock market is crashing. Undoubtedly, it’s never fun when stocks experience their worst days in some number of months or even years
After all, historic stock market crashes tend to happen shortly after all is well, and the market is at or close to making new all-time highs (think the 2020 COVID market meltdown). But, as a long-term investor, you probably won’t be all too thrilled with your results if you flinch anytime a day like Friday happens. Given the froth in the semiconductor industry, perhaps a bit of selling can act as a release valve so that the AI bull market can continue onward without running the risk of too much capital in a narrower part of the market.
Any way you look at it, corrections, even bear markets, can happen, and investors shouldn’t hit the panic button. If anything, there are genuinely cheap opportunities, not only within the tech sector, but within the AI theme. And if these names, like Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT), continue to be dragged down, perhaps there’s an opportunity for value names to become even deeper with value.