The Magnificent Three? By Spencer Jakab

Forget jobs or inflation-today's the day that has investors on tenterhooks: Nvidia results come out after the bell . A well-received report could reverse the doubts that have crept into the AI-related stock boom. After four straight days of losses for U.S. stocks, futures suggest modest gains at the open.

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

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

Amid the excitement, though, one has the feeling that investors don't always know their cultural references. At the end of the 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 distinct types of market-category crazes: flashes in the pan 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.

Back 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, for similar reasons.

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.

Less-enduring 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 '50s 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.

Other faded fads of just 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.

AI technology certainly has legs, but the arc of history bends toward mediocrity for stocks once they get their own sobriquet.

CONTENT FROM: GOLDMAN SACHS How are investors navigating commodities markets?

Gold, oil, and rare earth minerals have seen significant volatility in recent months, driven by policy changes and shifts in supply and demand dynamics. Commodities could now serve as an important role in portfolio diversification.

Hear the forecast for commodities on Goldman Sachs Exchanges.

Stocks I'm Watching

Target and Lowe's : The big-box retailers are due to post earnings early Wednesday. On Tuesday, Home Depot shares fell 6% after the home-improvement chain cut its outlook .

TJX : The T.J. Maxx owner is also slated to post quarterly results this morning.

La-Z-Boy : The furniture seller posted better-than-expected quarterly results

and raised its dividend. Shares gained more than 7% in off-hours trading.

Brookfield Asset Management : The investment firm is raising $10 billion for a new AI infrastructure fund , with Nvidia and the Kuwait Investment Authority planning to invest as founding partners. Brookfield shares dropped 2% offhours.

Alphabet: Shares in the Google parent rose over 1% premarket. The stock was little changed on Tuesday after Google launched Gemini 3 , as it seeks to shake up the AI chatbot race.

One Big Chart

Paramount Is the Only Logical Winner in the Three-Horse Race for Warner

"Top Gun Meets Harry Potter" might bomb as a pitch for a movie. As a deal pitch, though, it strangely works .

What I'm Reading The rally in crypto prices this year was boosted by a large heap of debt, with traders using leverage to amplify their gains. The dangers are becoming apparent after a recent tumble. ( WSJ ) Elon Musk's xAI is in advanced talks to raise $15 billion in new equity at a $230 billion valuation. It's burning cash rapidly to train its chatbot. ( WSJ ) A U.S. district judge dismissed the FTC's claims that Meta Platforms holds an illegal social-media monopoly. ( WSJ ) Bond markets have Europe's large economies in a bind. It's a warning for President Trump. ( Barron's ) Homebuilder confidence has been negative for 19 consecutive months. ( Calculated Risk ) Today in Markets History

On this day in 1938, Robert Edward Turner was born. After taking over his family's advertising business, Ted got into TV. He started in 1970 with a single independent UHF station in Atlanta. He launched CNN in 1980 to almost universal predictions of failure.

Beyond the Newsroom

WSJ | Buy Side: Why, yes, you can give a stylish gift without blowing your budget-see our list of the best gifts under $50 .

About Me

Business and finance have fascinated me for a long time. Before writing this newsletter, I edited The Wall Street Journal's Heard on the Street team for a decade, wrote two investment books and managed a team of stock analysts at a global investment bank.

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This article is a text version of a Wall Street Journal newsletter published earlier today.

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November 19, 2025 06:33 ET (11:33 GMT)

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