**Sector Shifts In the November Selloff**
November, typically the strongest stock month of the year since 1980, has not been fun for bulls in 2025. Ahead of the holiday-shortened week, the S&P 500 was down about 3.5% for November to date as of 11/21/25. That’s actually a whole lot better than the Nasdaq Composite, which has declined about 6% in November and is down 7% since attaining an all-time closing high on 10/28/25. The Dow has done a little better relatively speaking, declining 2.8% in November to date.
Given tame-to-terrible returns in other asset classes, we think any AI profit-taking is being redeployed into the stock market. We regard the selling in tech- and AI-related stocks as moderate so far -- and even grudging, as investors don’t want to jump off the AI freight train, given the transformation and disruption promised by AI advocates.
**Taking Something Off the Top of the AI trade**
When the Nasdaq is doing twice as bad as the broad market, you can bet investors are selling stakes in technology stocks. But we have not seen a massive exit from AI stocks nor from the Information Technology sector overall. The fixed-income market is not soaring, and alternative investments – private equity, real estate – are not exactly rallying. Cryptocurrency standard-bearer Bitcoin has given back all of its 2025 gains and more. And gold is about break even over the past month.
All this suggests that money exiting the tech sector and the AI trade is staying in the stock market. Moreover, investors are not abandoning their AI investments; they instead appear to be paring positions while maintaining core holdings. You can’t blame them for taking something off the top. And you also can’t blame them for hanging on to core AI positions, given the promise that the AI revolution aims to deliver.
The AI earnings season has stunned investors – not because the news is bad, but because the AI economy is promising growth that has quickly pushed past the earlier hundreds of billions of dollars into the muti-trillions range. Investors don’t know what to do with this information, which represents either the most spectacular growth opportunity in history or the biggest investing balloon ever.
The tentpole of the AI revolution, Nvidia, reported its fiscal 3Q26 results after the market close on 11/19/25. What transpired in the following 24 hours encapsulates all the excitement, astonishment, skepticism, and fear that has characterized the three years since ChatGPT was made widely available in November 2022.
Pushing back against fears that AI was in a bubble phase, Nvidia co-founder and CEO Jensen Huang doubled down on claims made at the company’s GTC event in October in Washington D.C. The CEO reiterated that the company is on track for cumulative Blackwell, Blackwell Ultra, and Rubin GPU and related revenue of \$500 billion by the end of calendar 2026. Given the many deals announced since GTC Washington, Nvidia said it likely will raise that \$500 billion goal.
The company also stands by its mind-blowing forecast that the global annual spend on AI infrastructure will be \$3-\$4 trillion by approximately 2030. That is substantially higher than the \$1 trillion in annual AI infrastructure spending forecast by CEO Dr. Lisa Su of Advanced Micro Devices, Nvidia’s closest rival. The market for AI technology is changing dramatically and broadening dramatically. In the months leading up to Nvidia’s quarterly results release, the company announced multiple new AI partnership deals – not with the hyperscalers that dominated earlier GPU demand, but with dozens of large global enterprises and sovereign clients.
Nvidia’s revenue for fiscal 3Q26 beat consensus expectations by billions, and its revenue guidance for fiscal 4Q26 beat by billions more. The stock soared in the aftermarket on 11/19/25 and surged at the open on 11/20/25, carrying the broad market on its \$4 trillion market-cap shoulders. But by midday, the rally was fizzling – and by the 11/20/25 market close, the broad market, the AI trade, and NVDA were all lower. Investors who had dependably bought every dip for the past three years learned overnight how to sell the rally.
**Where Investors are Redeploying AI Winnings**
AI winnings are being redeployed into other sectors – some of which are seen as beneficiaries as AI expands from the hyperscale data center into diverse enterprise use cases. Third-quarter performance at the sector level shows where some of those AI winnings are going, while analysis of full-year performance suggests that investors are not giving up on the AI trade altogether.
For 4Q25 to date, the best sector performer by far is Healthcare (IYH), which was up 10.8% as of the 11/21/25 close. The S&P 500, by contrast, is down 1.3% for the quarter to date. Not only is Healthcare one of just two sectors that are up for the quarter to date; it has done so well in the quarter that it has rescued what had been a terrible performance as of the nine-month mark.
Healthcare has benefited from the perception that the sector was oversold based on difficult trends being reported by a single niche (healthcare insurers). The Healthcare sector overall has certainly been helped by President Trump’s intervention to lower the monthly price of GLP-1 drugs. While that may depress profit margin in the near term for Lilly and Novo Nordisk, it could lead to enough volume leverage to offset pricing pressures. The clock is ticking toward the calendar 2025 year-end expiration of Affordable Care Act subsidies, the issue that caused the longest government shutdown in history. If the Democrats and Republicans can’t agree on a compromise and millions of families elect not to maintain their health insurance, the sector may look a lot different to investors in 2026.
The only other sector that is positive in 4Q25 to date is Utilities. The rate-sensitive sector has been lifted by the two rate cuts in September and October and the (fading) potential for a third cut in December. Relative outperformers, meaning sectors down less than 2% in the fourth quarter, include Consumer Staples, Energy, and Real Estate. The three traditional growth-sector leaders – Communication Services, Information Processing, and Consumer Discretionary – are down 6%, 3%, and 6%, respectively, in 4Q25 as of 11/21/25.
All this to-and-fro action in 4Q25 has had the effect of smoothing the overall sector map for full-year 2025. For the year to date, Consumer Staples is the only sector that is negative, and it is down less than 1%. Sectors that are up in single-digit percentages for 2025 to date include (in ascending order) Consumer Discretionary, Real Estate, Energy, and Industrials. Sectors that are up in double-digit percentage for 2025 to date include (in ascending order) Materials, Financial, Healthcare, Communication Services, Utilities, and Information Technology. No sector is up as much as 20%; both Communication Services and Information Technology were above the 20% marker at the end of 3Q25.
**Conclusion**
AI mania is plainly not the only driver in the market. For much of 2025, stocks have broadly traded on tariff developments. Prior to November, the market sold off deeply on tariff sticker-shock at the beginning of April and sold off moderately just ahead of scheduled tariff implementation at the beginning of August. Trends in domestic inflation and employment have also driven the market, even as investors play guessing games amid absent economic data.
One reason the AI trade has held up for three straight years is that tariffs, inflation, and the weakening employment economy all present risks – whereas AI is a bright star promising unprecedented transformation and unimaginable value creation. The bloom is likely off the rose, now that the AI trade has had its first real setback since November 2022. “The greatest thing since the Internet†tag still applies, but so too does caution.
We do not expect the AI trade to collapse the way, say, the collateralized mortgage market collapsed in 2008-09. The cloud might be a better template. The cloud as an investing concept emerged from Amazon’s need to organize its aircraft carrier-sized shoebox of vendor receipts, morphed into the “greatest thing since the internet,†and then became a typically uneven investment whose ups and downs were bookended by greed and fear. We expect the AI trade to be bumpy going forward. And like other transformational technology trades before it, including cloud, internet, semiconductors, and PCs, we expect the AI trade to be long and fruitful. (Jim Kelleher, CFA, Director of Research)