London-listed tech funds Scottish Mortgage Investment Trust PLC (LSE:SMT) and Polar Capital Technology Trust PLC (LSE:PCT) bore the scars on Friday of a sharp reversal of the market mood overnight on Wall Street.
The tech-powered Nasdaq jumpstarted the session with a 2% gain at the open, before toppling over 4.5% from its intraday high to end down 486 points at 22,078.05.
After publishing blockbuster earnings the previous evening, AI bellwether Nvidia's share price movements were the catalyst for the wider market, opening almost 5% higher before ending down just shy of 3% lower.
Apple fell 0.9%, Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon, Tesla, Cisco fell between 1% and 3%, AMSL and Palantir dropped over 5%, AMD and Oracle plunged over 6%.
In early trading in London on Friday, the larger Scottish Mortgage fell 2.6%, while the more Nasdaq-exposed Polar Cap fund investment trust was down 4.6%.
"Yesterday was something," said market analyst Ipek Ozkardeskaya at Swissquote, who was "happily sitting and watching Nvidia save the market" before "all of a sudden...the mood started souring, and things went downhill from there."
Neil Wilson at Saxo said investors were likely to be "feeling a bit bewildered" after the sharp reversal in fortunes, after "a sudden switch saw sellers take over" with the biggest one-day swing since April's tariff shocks.
"It was, in short, a tough day for bulls and a tough day for the Nvidia-will-save-the-market narrative," he said, flagging that AI-related names, from chipmakers to hyperscalers, were those most caught up in the wave of selling, with Asian and European tech shares following suit.
The Polar Capital trust has, according to its website, 36% of its portfolio exposure to semiconductors & semiconductor equipment among the shares of 92 companies it owns.
Scottish Mortgage top 10 holdings
- SpaceX 7.6%
- Mercadolibre 5.4%
- TSMC 5.3%
- Amazon.com 4.6%
- Bytedance Ltd 3.8%
- NVIDIA 3.6%
- Meta Platforms 3.6%
- ASML 3.0%
- Shopify 2.8%
- PDD Holdings 2.7%
Polar Cap Tech Trust top 10 holdings
- NVIDIA 11.2%
- Apple 7.1%
- Alphabet 6.7%
- Microsoft 5.9%
- Broadcom 5.5%
- TSMC 4.5%
- AMD 3.8%
- Meta Platforms 3.3%
- LAM Research 2.2%
- Cloudflare 2.1%