Stocks Started 2026 at Records, Led Again by Chipmakers
The S&P 500 closed January at an all-time high of 6,978.60, with Broadcom and other semiconductor names driving the advance and SanDisk more than doubling in a single month.
NEW YORK — The S&P 500 rose 0.41% to a record close of 6,978.60 on Tuesday, extending a January rally powered by semiconductor and megacap technology shares.
The month's gains were broad by the standards of recent years. Materials and industrials — sectors that spent three years being ignored in favor of technology — participated meaningfully in the first full week of trading, and the Dow Jones Industrial Average set records of its own.
The chip trade, again
Broadcom and other chipmakers did the heaviest lifting, on the same logic that has driven this market since 2023: capital spending on AI infrastructure keeps being revised upward, and the companies selling the picks and shovels capture it first.
The month's single most remarkable performance came from SanDisk, which more than doubled — an early signal of the memory shortage that would define the sector for the rest of the year. Outside technology, Moderna rose nearly 50% following an update on its cancer vaccine program.
What the market believed in January
Positioning at the start of the year assumed a benign path: inflation drifting down, the Federal Reserve delivering perhaps one more cut, and earnings growth broadening beyond the largest technology names.
Two of those three turned out to be wrong. Inflation re-accelerated after an energy shock at the end of February, and the Fed has not cut since December. Earnings did broaden, which is part of why the index has managed to reach new records anyway — 800 points higher than this January close, through an oil spike, a trillion-dollar semiconductor selloff and a change of Fed chair.
The lesson in the level
Investors who bought that January record and held it are up roughly 11% for the year. Investors who sold in March, when the S&P 500 fell to 6,506.48 amid the oil shock, missed the recovery.
The path from one record to the next has been anything but smooth, and the year's most reliable pattern has been that market-wide panics about the AI trade have resolved within weeks rather than quarters.
