THE BIG IDEA
Something weird happened in the stock market last week.
Yeah, I know what you are thinking: there is always something weird happening in the stock market.
But this time is different, as they say. Let’s start with the chart below, obtained from Bespoke Investment Group. It was published on their bespokepremium.com website on Wednesday morning. NVIDIA reported earnings later that day after the market close.
For the last two years, the ups and downs of the stock market have been highly correlated with movements in NVDA shares. It isn’t a 1:1 ratio. They are on different scales. (SPY is on the Right axis on the chart, BTW)
The moral of the story is that NVDA and “the stock market”, or at least the S&P 500, rise and fall together. That’s not a big shocker, since NVDA itself accounts for about 7.7% of the S&P 500.
But last week the S&P 500 gained 0.9% while NVDA dropped by 4.4%.
Is this a short-term aberration? Will they begin rowing the boat in the same direction again? Or is NVDA just not a shiny new toy anymore?
Nobody really knows for sure.
But we can take a guess. One thing that is helping us to make a guess is by unweighting the S&P 500 stocks.
Except for the Iran conflict scare and rebound, stocks have been chopping sideways for 3 ½ months.
On Friday, the index poked its head up above the layer of fog it has been stuck in. Maybe - maybe - it is the start of a rotation out of megacap stars like NVDA and into the rest of the market.
Last week, even as NVDA was taking a loss, the popular VanEck Semiconductor ETF posted a gain of 3.6%. Stocks are not going down with NVDA. Not even other semiconductor stocks. The market is only falling out of love with NVDA.
SEEN ON THE INTERNETS
The bottom point for the stock market for the Trump-Iran War came on March 30th.
As part of a video presentation from Strategas Asset Management, they provided the slide copied in below.
Here we see where the money has been going since that bottom at the end of March.
Short answer: Technology, and only technology.
Tech-related ETFs have received 20 thousand million dollars of new money. Let’s call it $20 billion. The rest of the market has netted out to a big zero. Actually, an outflow of $334 million, but who cares about such trivial amounts.
The video itself is only 4 minutes, and worth watching for more background and possible implications of the tech frenzy.
NUMBERS ONLY
$80 billion | NVIDIA announced that the company would buy back $80 billion of their own shares. That’s enough money to buy all of General Motors or Ford. (but not both!) |
10.04% | Aerospace continues its silent bull market while everyone runs around yelling “AI!”. The Procure Space ETF (ticker: UFO) was up 10.04% for the week. |
15 | Fifteen stocks in the NASDAQ 100 reached all-time highs on Friday. |
SWINGEX INDEX
As of market close on: 22 May 2026
Swingy says: The index isn't too excited to do anything. Take a few days, go outside, and play.
Learn more about how the Swingex Index works here.
WATCHER
Stocks highlighted here each week are not recommendations to buy or sell. They are provided as ideas for swing traders to follow up on with their own research.
SPIR last 3-months
SPIR (Spire Global): Spire is one of the less-known companies in the Aerospace field (mentioned in this week’s Numbers section). They are “building a space-powered, global data network”.
The stock peaked on April 13th with a closing price of $23.14. It got there from $16 in just a few days and with some historically heavy volume. It would be normal for a stock in those circumstances to have a cooling off period. And that’s what happened.
In fact, it cooled off all the way back to $16. But notice how the trading volume dried up. When there was no one left who wanted sell, the shares began climbing again.
SPIR has wound up forming a pretty orderly base over the last 6 weeks. The stock is likely to at least test the previous high, which is still an 8% advance away. It might even continue higher from there, if Aerospace remains a coveted area of the market.