{"id":384227,"date":"2026-01-02T21:16:10","date_gmt":"2026-01-02T21:16:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/384227\/"},"modified":"2026-01-02T21:16:10","modified_gmt":"2026-01-02T21:16:10","slug":"its-a-new-year-and-traders-want-the-same-old-ai-stocks","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/384227\/","title":{"rendered":"It\u2019s a new year and traders want the same old AI stocks"},"content":{"rendered":"

Chip stocks post record outperformance of software companies in never-before-seen divergence<\/a><\/p>\n

One session in 2026 brings one thing we\u2019ve never seen before in markets: a massive divergence between the two big parts of the technology sector.<\/p>\n

The VanEck Semiconductor ETF<\/a> absolutely trounced the iShares Expanded Tech Software ETF<\/a> today, with the former gaining 3.7% leaving while the latter dropped 2.9%.<\/p>\n

The 6.6 percentage point gap is the biggest outperformance for SMH versus IGV on record, going back to December 2011.<\/p>\n

Since these two are both parts of a broader technology whole, it\u2019s rare to have one up a ton while the other gets shellacked. The rolling one-year correlation of daily returns for these two ETFs was about 0.8 heading into today.<\/p>\n

There have only been three sessions (including today) where the chip stock ETF was up at least 1.5% while the software ETF was down 1.5% or more. We\u2019ve never seen SMH gain 2% while IGV fell 2% before Friday\u2019s session. And there\u2019s only been one session where the reverse happened (November 11, 2024).<\/p>\n

The opening trading day of 2026 was phenomenal for the AI picks and shovels trade<\/a>, while very poor for their more downstream peers<\/a>.<\/p>\n

How and why did this happen? Who knows really, but this looks like the kind of thing where a couple major funds decide to keep their total AI exposure stable but leaning into a hardware over software tilt when adjusting their positioning at the start of the year, which kicks off intraday momentum that forces everyone else along for the ride.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Chip stocks post record outperformance of software companies in never-before-seen divergence One session in 2026 brings one thing…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":384228,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[45],"tags":[182,181,507,74],"class_list":["post-384227","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/384227","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=384227"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/384227\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/384228"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=384227"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=384227"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=384227"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}