The Hateful Eight is 85% of S&P 500 Decline

The former Mag 7 + Oracle are the main culprits in index decline this year

Year-to-date, the S&P 500 index is down 7%, but that headline hides record concentration. The “Hateful Eight” — the Mag 7 + Oracle that drove index gains for the past two years — account for 85% of the year-to-date drawdown, subtracting roughly 576 points. The other ~490 companies collectively added about 100 points.

For most of the past cycle, indexes were driven by number of mega-cap tech stocks. Now that is all reversing, with the broad market overwhelmed by losses in a handful of stocks with outsized weights.

As you can see in the cluster above, the largest negative contributors are in the same cohort: Microsoft, Nvidia, Google, Apple, Amazon, Meta, Tesla, and Oracle. Their declines vary, but their index impact is large because of their huge weights. Meanwhile, many smaller index members are up year-to-date, but their contributions get washed away.

When leadership is this concentrated, index behavior becomes a function of a few balance sheets, not underlying breadth. And then sentiment flips, in particular about AI capex and associated debt, as it has, everything goes into reverse.

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