Software vs. chips, stocks flat, oil prices: Market Takeaways

Yahoo Finance Video and Jared Blikre

Thu, February 12, 2026 at 7:20 AM GMT+9

In this video:

^GSPC

-0.00%

^RUT

-0.38%

XLK

+0.29%

IGV

-2.55%

SOXX

+2.50%

All three of the major indexes (^DJI, ^IXIC, ^GSPC) ended Wednesday’s trading session just below their flatlines — the S&P 500 capping the day off completely flat.

Yahoo Finance Markets and Data Editor Jared Blikre breaks down the biggest market themes from today’s trading day, including the two competing narratives emerging from software and semiconductor stocks and the pickup in crude oil prices (CL=F, BZ=F).

To watch more expert insights and analysis on the latest market action, check out more Asking for a Trend.

Video Transcript

00:00 Speaker A

Jared Blikre joins us now with a training day takeaways, Jared.

00:02 Jared Blikre

We got to talk about these two stories going on in tech and today was a fantastic example. I am talking software versus chips. First off, we’re going to take a look at software. That is ugly. This is uh just one day by the by the way, I’m going to change this to an equal weighted view where we have uh sorted by performance. There’s Unity down there, just talking to the CEO, down 26% in one day. Hubspot, 10%, Path, 10% as well. Only one stock in this mix, not exhaustive, in the green and that would be CrowdStrike, cyber security.

00:39 Jared Blikre

Now let’s take a look at the semiconductors. Again, just one day. And there we got Micron up 10%. That’s not even the best. We got Global Foundries up 16%, SanDisk. And if I show you the year to date, it’s going to be a similar story. And there you got some bigger numbers. SanDisk up 150%. I’ll go back to software and see who’s in the lead this year. And we got Cisco up 11%. Meanwhile, Unity leading the way down again, that’s down 51%. But uh let’s compare a software ETF to a semiconductor ETF. This goes back one year. Guess which one is the semiconductor? That would be the one up here. But they really diverged last September. This is nothing new, but I just think today puts a nice stamp on that that whole theme.

01:44 Speaker A

So that’s chips and software. What about the major indices? You want to take a beat there?

01:47 Jared Blikre

Yes. Yes, because the majors are going nowhere for the most part. I had the opportunity to sit down with uh Kevin Gordon of Schwab, a really smart guy and he we’re talking about, you know, the all the sector rotation that we’ve seen this year along with Brooke DePalma by the way. This episode drops tomorrow, but just listen to what he had to say about this rotation.

02:12 Kevin Gordon

you know, really moving away as you mentioned from that tech leadership or the tech adjacent leadership and going into other parts of the market. I think it’s been really interesting and an interesting thought experiment for a lot of investors who have been used to so much of that mega cap dominance over the past several years where now you are still seeing healthy breath, but it’s not necessarily materializing and manifesting in strong index level gains.

02:44 Jared Blikre

Yeah, so you you’re not seeing it in the indices, at least some of them. Here’s the S&P 500 over the last six months. The S&P 500 closed today at 16941. First hit that price December 26th. It has gone nowhere basically in the last seven weeks. Here’s the Nasdaq. Guess what? It has gone nowhere over the last four months. You’d have to go back to early October. That’s when it first hit this closing price.

03:16 Jared Blikre

Now there is an exception. That would be the Dow. Check out the Dow. Uh this has trended up nicely over the last six months. In fact, if I show you the one year, it’s been from those low, those were the post liberation day lows, basically from the lower left to the upper right. And that’s really what you want to see in a chart, very little volatility. And I’ll throw those are the Dow Jones Industrials. Here are the transportation, here’s the transportation index, which really took off. It was going sideways for a number of months, but it finally took off late last year. And so this just goes to show you that sometimes you got to be smart. You can’t just be passive and invest in the S&P 500, the Kahuna all the time and expect those outsize returns. Sometimes you got to be in some other indices.

04:22 Jared Blikre

But uh the big question is, is tech going to stage a comeback? Are we going to see the Nasdaq break out? Unless this bull market is over, which I don’t think it is, yes, we will. And then you’re going to see the majors catch up because the market cap, those big stocks are going to send the majors up again. But in the meantime, you just need to be a little bit more diversified or you need to be patient.

04:47 Speaker A

You know what we haven’t talked about in a while, crude.

04:50 Speaker A

It’s perking up a bit.

04:51 Jared Blikre

Yes. Yeah, you know, we talk about Bitcoin almost every day, gold, silver, but let’s talk about crude. And as you said, it is perking up here. So I’m going to go to our futures heat map and what I like about crude is it just kind of broke out on a short-term basis here, although it does, it’s around $65 a barrel. Here’s crude up 13% this year. Let me put a uh three-month view and put some candlesticks and here we see this nice little flag right here. We just broke to the upside. Nothing definitive there, but I want to show you a one-year chart. and I’ll put some lines back on this. We’ve recently broke out of this negative downtrend right here.

05:43 Jared Blikre

Now, what’s this overhead resistance I was talking about? You got to go to the three year for that. And basically it’s right here. It’s another negative trend line. If you were to be able to get over that and it’s coming to about $70 a barrel right now, then you have a shot at getting up to those higher numbers like 80, 90, 100, but just to get above 70, I think we’re going to need a new catalyst. And uh, I would also say yes, obviously, that’s not great for people who are driving automobiles because that drives price of gas up too. But a lot of talk about a commodity super cycle, oil would have to be a part of that and also, I think a weaker dollar as well.

06:33 Speaker A

Right. And here on the metals.

06:35 Jared Blikre

Yeah, let’s check out gold and silver too. This is year to date. So in the upper left here, guess what? RBOB gasoline is is topping silver. Uh but I digress. Here’s silver over the last three years. We know this story. Let me just get the uh year to date so we can see, there we go. We can see the recent what’s happened here. So here’s that big drop and basically silver has been going sideways here. And what I said uh yesterday or a couple days ago, I do like the price action in gold because unlike silver, it has managed to lift off a bit more. Still in kind of a sell zone right there. This gets the shorts interested, but I think it has a shot at attacking these record highs, whereas silver, it looks like it’s going to take a little while to get over that 30% drop in one day.

07:33 Speaker A

All right. Thank you much. Appreciate it.

07:35 Jared Blikre

Thank you.

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