Catenaa, Saturday, March 28, 2026- The “Magnificent Seven” megacap stocks erased more than $850 billion in market value over the past week amid growing fears that rising inflation will keep interest rates higher for longer.
Meta posted its worst week since October 2025, down more than 11% as Wall Street continued to grapple with the company’s loss in a landmark social media lawsuit earlier this week.
A jury found Meta and YouTube parent Google negligent for failing to protect young users on their platforms. Alphabet closed out the week down nearly 9%.
Microsoft ended the week 6.5% lower and is on track for its worst quarter since 2008 as software stocks have been particularly hard-hit.
Nvidia and Amazon fell roughly 3% for the week, while Tesla dropped nearly 2% over the five days.
Semiconductor stocks rebounded on Friday, but Sandisk and Micron Technology still ended the week in the red after sharp losses on Thursday.
The sell-off followed Alphabet Inc.’s release of new research outlining an algorithm designed to reduce AI memory usage, a development that rattled memory and broader semiconductor stocks.
Growth stocks were hit this week as bond yields rose amid expectations of higher inflation from surging oil prices, with investors anticipating the Federal Reserve will not be able to cut rates this year, as previously expected.
The only Magnificent Seven stock to end the week slightly higher was Apple, following a report this week that it plans to open its Siri voice assistant to rival artificial intelligence services beyond its current partnership with OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
But market pullbacks often create opportunities. Trading at about $199 as of this writing, Amazon has seen its shares slide in recent weeks amid the broader tech sell-off, and following management’s announcement that it will invest about $200 billion in capital expenditures this year.
The recent decline puts shares down about 14% year to date, underperforming the S&P 500.
When a company plans to invest roughly $200 billion in capital expenditures in a single year, the market is bound to ask questions. And that’s what the market seems to be doing lately.
After all, even in Q4, before the company’s more aggressive spending plans for 2026 were underway, Amazon’s free cash flow was already pressured by a huge increase in capital expenditures last year.
Amazon’s trailing-12-month free cash flow dropped to $11.2 billion at the end of 2025, down from $38.2 billion in 2024.
But judging the e-commerce and cloud giant solely by its free cash flow right now misses the mark. A more accurate measure of the company’s more durable business trajectory is its operating cash flow, which strips out those heavy infrastructure investments.
For 2025, Amazon’s trailing-12-month operating cash flow surged 20% year over year to an incredible $139.5 billion.
