Wall Street ends down as Nvidia slides and private equity stocks sink
Thu February 19, 2026 5:35 AM
The AI vs software developers tug-of-war resurfaced today when private equity firm (the firms that finance these smaller companies) Blue Owl Capital sold $1.4B in assets citing repeated concerns about software firms to be hurt by AI. Other private equity firms followed the leader and did same. There was a rush out of everything, though following recent patterns, there was a huge dip in the middle of the day followed by a recovery of sorts. Everything looked much worse earlier with the Dow down over 450 by 1 pm (recovering about half of that in the final hour), and the Nasdaq down over 150 by 3 pm, again recovering about half in the final hour.
Positive earnings reports pushed the Dow back up, Also helping industrials was today’s jobless claims report suggesting a stabilizing labor market. Pushing down tech was a slump in Apple. Just like the 1990s, we’re in the Wild West again with AI advancing so rapidly that some of the smaller software firms will not be able to keep up. As today’s expert put it, “Not everyone’s going to win and not all expectations are going to be met.” To gauge inflation, all eyes will be fixated on tomorrow’s PCE report. The good news is that though it was a considerably down day, at least it was down on light volume which came in at 16.4 billion vs the 20.5 average.
DJ: 49,662.66 +129.47 NAS: 22,753.64
+175.25 S&P: 6,881.32
+38.10 2/18
DJ: 49,395.16 -267.50 NAS: 22,682.73
-70.91 S&P: 6,861.89
-19.42 2/19
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