For almost a year, seven of the world’s most important companies went nowhere.
That sounds strange because we constantly hear about Alphabet (GOOGL), Amazon (AMZN), Apple (AAPL), Meta (META), Microsoft (MSFT), Nvidia (NVDA), and Tesla (TSLA).
They’re called the Magnificent Seven, and for good reason.
These aren’t seven random stocks that got popular on Reddit (RDDT). These are some of the largest and most successful businesses ever created.
They make the chips that power artificial intelligence. They build the software we use at work. They make our phones.
They sell us practically everything. They run the biggest digital advertising businesses on Earth.
I spend my life studying stocks from all over the world. We look at every country, every sector, and every industry we can find.
And one thing becomes obvious pretty quickly: An incredible number of the world’s best companies are right here in the United States.
The Magnificent Seven are a pretty good example.
But even the best companies in the world don’t go up every day.
Last October, the Magnificent Seven stopped going up. The group peaked around the end of the month and then spent most of the next year going sideways.
And the timing was almost too perfect.
On October 29, 2025, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis posted about what he called the “Magnificent Seven economy,” questioning whether the stock market had become too dependent on such a small group of companies.
That was basically the day they stopped leading.
You can’t make this stuff up.
Somebody Else Gets the Ball
Here’s where things get interesting.
If the Magnificent Seven stopped going up last fall, you might assume the stock market stopped going up, too.
It didn’t. Other stocks simply took their turn.
That’s one of the most important things to understand about bull markets: Leadership changes.
Sometimes technology leads. Sometimes industrial stocks lead. Sometimes banks start working. Sometimes energy stocks take over.
Sometimes small companies start beating the giants.
Think about a basketball team. Your best player doesn’t need to score every basket.
In fact, the best teams are usually the ones where several different players can score.
Markets work the same way.
While everybody was complaining that the stock market depended on seven companies, those seven companies spent months doing basically nothing.
Money moved elsewhere. Other sectors and industries participated. The market kept finding new places to go.
This is what we mean when we talk about sector rotation.
It sounds like complicated Wall Street language. It isn’t. One group rests. Another group runs. Then they switch.
That’s healthy.
And it’s why I’ve never understood the obsession with needing every stock to go up at the same time. That isn’t how markets work.
Leadership changes constantly.
Our job is to identify where the leadership is now, not complain that yesterday’s leaders are taking a break.
The Biggest Stocks in the World Just Woke Up
Now comes the fun part.
After spending most of the past year going sideways, the Magnificent Seven are breaking out to new all-time highs again.
The giants are back.
This matters because these companies are enormous.
When companies this large start going up together, they can move the major stock market indexes with them.
But I think there’s an even more important lesson here.
For much of the past year, investors were told that the market had a problem because the Magnificent Seven weren’t leading anymore.
Before that, they were told the market had a problem because the Magnificent Seven were leading too much.
See how this works?
When seven stocks lead, people complain that the market is too concentrated.
When those seven stocks stop leading, people complain that the leaders are broken.
And now that they’re breaking out again, I’m sure we’ll find a new reason why that’s bad too.
That’s what makes markets so entertaining. There’s always something to worry about.
Meanwhile, prices keep doing what prices do.
The lesson isn’t that the Magnificent Seven will go up forever. Nothing does.
The lesson is that leadership rotates, and strong markets have a funny way of finding new leaders while the old ones catch their breath.
For almost a year, some of the biggest and most important companies on earth sat on the bench.
The rest of the team kept playing. Now the stars are checking back into the game.
Let’s see what they do with the ball.