Four tech giants carried the S&P 500 through Q3 while most stocks fell

The S&P 500 finished the third quarter of 2026 in positive territory. But the gains came from a handful of companies, not the market as a whole. Four stocks, Microsoft, Nvidia, Apple and Meta Platforms, added about 300 points to the index during the quarter. The remaining constituents pulled it down by about 150 points, which left the benchmark with a net gain of roughly half what the big four contributed on their own. A quarter powered by four tickers The S&P 500 rose approximately 2% in Q3 and closed somewhere between 7,651 and 7,666 points. That brings its year-to-date gain to about 11.77%. Underneath that steady headline number, the market looked much weaker. Around 311 of the index’s roughly 500 companies posted declines over the quarter. Microsoft led the group by a wide margin. Its shares climbed between 33% and 37.5%, helped by encouraging earnings and growth in its Azure cloud business. Meta came next, advancing between 18% and 28.7% on the back of developments in AI. Nvidia rose approximately 13% to 14%, and Apple gained between 13% and 15%. Energy stocks actually posted the biggest percentage gains of any sector during the quarter. Yet technology’s sheer weight i...