Apple and Tesla: Dreadful Two Instead of Magnificent Seven

By Felix Richter – Statista

Despite the fact that Wall Street’s hopes for a first rate cut in March turned out to be premature, markets were off to a flying start of 2024, as the S&P 500 went from strength to strength, ending the first quarter at yet another all-time high – the 22nd of this year. Overall, the index returned 10.6 percent in the first three months of 2024, marking the best first-quarter performance since 2019. Like last year’s rally, the index’s latest strength was largely fueled by the excitement surrounding artificial intelligence, as chipmaker Nvidia and Microsoft, a key investor in OpenAI, were the biggest contributors to the S&P 500’s overall gains. Meta and Amazon were also among the index’s top performers, while two other familiar names found themselves in unfamiliar territory.

Apple and Tesla, both part of the so-called “Magnificent Seven” that rallied through large parts of 2023, had a terrible start to the year, with their respective stock prices dropping 11 and 29 percent in the first quarter. Given their stature in the market-cap-weighted index, the not-so magnificent performance of both Apple and Tesla stood in the way of an even better quarter for the S&P 500, as the “Dreadful Two” dragged the index’s return down 1.3 percentage points.