By Spencer Jakab

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You could do worse than owning companies prominent enough to have a shared nickname, but you could probably do better.

The group on everyone's lips is the Magnificent Seven. Those stocks' performance-especially Nvidia, which will unveil quarterly results this afternoon-have almost singlehandedly supported the S&P 500 since ChatGPT was unveiled three years ago.

One has the feeling that investors don't always know their cultural references. At the end of the original movie (spoiler alert!), only three of the gunmen survive the shootout. Coincidentally, only three of the Magnificent Seven are beating the market this year: Nvidia, Microsoft and Google parent Alphabet.

The good news is that there are two types of market-category crazes: one-off flashes or high-quality stocks for which supposedly no price is too high. The Magnificent Seven belong firmly to the latter, and those tend to, at least, survive.

In the early 1970s, blue chips with lofty valuations were dubbed the Nifty Fifty. They later struggled, but only a few eventually went out of business-notably Kodak and Polaroid.

What's next? It wasn't that long ago that we were gushing about FANG-Facebook, Amazon, Netflix and Google. Apple's rise turned it into the clumsier FAANG.

Tesla's recent struggles might have cost us a useful consonant. If Meta and Alphabet ever have the good sense to revert to the names of their best-known products, then FANMAG sounds appropriate.

More fleeting market crazes have a long but not terribly proud history. Professor Burton Malkiel, in his classic "A Random Walk Down Wall Street," describes the late 1950s and early '60s "tronics" boom when transistors were cutting-edge. Brief winners included Circuitronics, Vulcatron, Videotronics and, ticking multiple boxes, Powertron Ultrasonics.

References to rocketry also shone in that post-Sputnik era. Malkiel describes a record company whose shares soared after it changed its name to Space-Tone.

That phenomenon keeps repeating itself, usually not by accident. Fish-food maker Zapata doubled in 1998 after launching a dot-com subsidiary. Long Island Iced Tea Corp. put "Blockchain" into its name and rose 500% before the market even opened during 2017's bitcoin boom. And the former Innovative Beverage Group seemed much more innovative after becoming Quantum Computing Inc.

Faded fads of the past quarter century include B2B, cleantech, the BRICs and 3-D printing. None lasted long, but they attracted both investor cash and occasional corporate impostors-an insincere form of flattery.

Nvidia's results could be great and AI certainly has legs. But the arc of history bends toward mediocrity for stocks once they get their own sobriquet.

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(END) Dow Jones Newswires

November 19, 2025 07:30 ET (12:30 GMT)

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