‘Magnificent Seven’ stocks have been storming back from this year’s lows, but some have significant room to climb before achieving new records

Microsoft now sits as the only “Magnificent Seven” stock that’s back in record territory.

Microsoft Corp. achieved a record close on Thursday — becoming the first among its peers to reclaim its highs since the Big Tech selloff earlier this year. 

The tech giant’s stock rose 0.8% on Thursday, finishing the day at $467.68. Microsoft’s previous record close was set last July at $467.56 a share. 

Microsoft’s recent momentum comes as tech stocks in general make a comeback, with Microsoft and Nvidia Corp. jockeying against one another in the race to be the most valuable U.S. public company by market capitalization. While Nvidia ended Tuesday’s session with a market cap ahead of Microsoft’s, the two reversed places as of Thursday’s finish.

Prior to Tuesday, the last time Nvidia was ahead of Microsoft was on March 25, according to Dow Jones Market Data. Apple Inc. was positioned above both companies at the time, but its shares have been under more pressure lately due to tariff threats between the U.S. and China. Apple’s stock fell 1.1% on Thursday, and is down almost 20% so far this year.

Apple’s stock is among the farthest from its all-time closing high among “Magnificent Seven” companies, trading more than 22% below that record finish achieved in late December. This chart below, from Dow Jones Market Data, shows how much other Big Tech shares need to rise to get back into record territory.

In May, Jefferies analysts said Microsoft’s stock remains their top artificial-intelligence pick after the company’s annual Build developer conference. Among the analysts’ key takeaways from the event was that Microsoft plans to roll out reasoning capabilities for its Copilot AI agent in the coming months.

“We are extremely bullish on the long-awaited announcements that Copilot will get reasoning capabilities with Researcher and Analyst agents — finally helping narrow the gap between OpenAI’s Deep Research,” the analysts said in a May 23 note.

The analysts also said they expect Microsoft to be faster at integrating reasoning models into Copilot in the future, and that there was upbeat sentiment among Microsoft customers at Build suggesting “that Copilot has improved meaningfully over the past 3 to 6 months.”

And despite “relatively small deployments” of Copilot among organizations, the analysts said many customers believe the slower rollout “is now paying off, as Copilot is in a much stronger position to deliver [return on investment] as it scales across” businesses. 

“Overall, most we spoke to expect their rollouts to continue to ramp throughout the organizations over the next couple of years,” Jefferies said.

As Microsoft’s customers, partners and executives integrate Copilot into workflows, the analysts said they “remain bullish on Copilot’s ability to drive a broader halo effect across Microsoft’s ecosystem, particularly in Security and Azure.”

Meanwhile, Nvidia’s stock was added to Jefferies analysts’ list of highest-conviction, buy-rated stock picks earlier this week, as the company is “the dominant supplier of AI accelerators” within the quickly growing data-center industry. With the ramp of Nvidia’s Blackwell AI platform “fully underway,” Jefferies said the chip maker’s gross margins should improve throughout the rest of the year from the low-70% range to its target mid-70% range.

Shares of Nvidia dropped 1.4% on Thursday, but are up 23% in the past month. The company’s last record closing price was $149.43 on Jan. 6, according to Dow Jones Market Data. Shares finished roughly 6% below that level on Thursday.