On paper, the market looks fine.
The S&P 500 is up roughly 8% year-to-date and recently touched an all-time high above 7,600.
But behind that headline number, a severe selloff has been grinding through some of the biggest names in tech.
And almost nobody is talking about the full extent of the damage.
The drawdown list nobody wants to see
Here are 17 major tech stocks and how far each has fallen from its all-time high:
- Coinbase (COIN): -69%
- Oracle (ORCL): -57%
- Salesforce (CRM): -57%
- ServiceNow (NOW): -56%
- Netflix (NFLX): -48%
- Palantir (PLTR): -48%
- Microsoft (MSFT): -37%
- Meta (META): -32%
- Arm Holdings (ARM): -27%
- Broadcom (AVGO): -26%
- Marvell Technology (MRVL): -20%
- Nvidia (NVDA): -19%
- Amazon (AMZN): -19%
- Alphabet (GOOGL): -17%
- CrowdStrike (CRWD): -15%
- Apple (AAPL): -14%
- Taiwan Semiconductor (TSM): -12%
A bear market is conventionally defined as a drop of 20% or more from a recent peak. By that measure, more than half of the names on this list are already there.
Why the S&P 500 doesn’t show it
The S&P 500 is a market-cap-weighted index, meaning the largest companies by total market value have the most influence over where the index goes.
In other words, the index tells you how the largest stocks are doing, not how the average stock is doing.
On the other hand, the equal-weight S&P 500 gives every stock the same influence regardless of size…
And it’s actually outperforming the standard cap-weighted index in 2026, running at around 11% vs. 8%.
That divergence tells you something important: This is not a broad-market collapse. The market’s strength is coming from outside the old mega-cap tech leadership.
Simply put, the index looks fine because other parts of the market are offsetting the damage in some of tech’s biggest former winners.
What’s driving the damage
- Valuations got stretched to extremes
The S&P 500’s cyclically adjusted price-to-earnings (P/E) ratio recently sat at 42.5. For context on how expensive that is, we haven’t seen a level like that since the dot-com era.
And when stocks are priced for perfection, anything short of perfection is punished hard.
- Interest rates stayed higher than the market expected
Growth stocks are valued heavily on what investors think they can earn years down the road. That works well when rates are low… But when rates stay elevated, the market becomes less willing to pay a premium for companies promising big earnings five or 10 years from now.
That hits software, fintech, and other high-growth tech names especially hard.
- AI spending triggered a rotation
Capital that once chased software multiples has been flowing toward the infrastructure layer (power, chips, and data centers).
That’s good news for certain names in the AI build-out, but it’s been a headwind for the application-layer software companies that dominated the last cycle.
What this means for your portfolio
The first thing to do is look at what you actually own.
If your portfolio is heavy on the names in that drawdown list, you may be sitting on losses that aren’t showing up clearly in your brokerage summary if those positions are balanced by other holdings.
The second thing to understand is that concentration is a double-edged sword. The cap-weighted S&P 500’s reliance on a small number of mega-caps protected the index on the way up. But it also means the index can look healthy while a real bear market is underway beneath it.
Bottom line
While the S&P 500 is near all-time highs, that data point doesn’t paint the whole picture.
Many major tech names are already deep in drawdown territory—the exact names that were supposed to be the safe, obvious choices in the growth trade.
That doesn’t mean you should panic. It means you need to look past the headline index and understand what you actually own… and whether the original thesis still holds at today’s price.
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