US equity futures turned into realized losses on Tuesday as the three major benchmarks opened sharply lower, with the Dow Jones Industrial Average down about 1.28%, the S&P 500 off roughly 1.33% and the Nasdaq Composite falling 1.59%. The weakness was concentrated in large technology names, amplifying pain for the market given their heavy index weightings.
Shares of several headline tech firms bore the brunt of the move: Nvidia, Alphabet, Amazon and Broadcom each slipped more than 2% in early trade. The retreat narrowed gains for indices that have been driven for months by a handful of mega-cap winners, exposing the market’s reliance on concentrated leadership and the vulnerability of growth stocks to short-term repricing.
At the same time, parts of the chip complex and storage sector bucked the broader decline. Taiwan’s United Microelectronics (UMC/联电) rallied more than 14% after commissioning production of a fourth-generation "SuperFlash" process, lifting its year-to-date gains to about 18%. Storage-focused names also posted strength, with several memory and disk stocks hitting fresh highs, underscoring a rotation within the tech space from software and platform winners to hardware and semiconductor plays.
The split between the largest platform companies and parts of the semiconductor supply chain matters because it changes the market’s risk profile. When a concentrated group of mega-caps leads, headline indices can appear healthy even as broad participation fades; a pullback among those names therefore translates into outsized index moves. Conversely, strength in more cyclical or capital-intensive technology firms often reflects different fundamentals — production ramp‑ups, capacity cycles and inventory dynamics rather than purely demand narratives.
Looking ahead, investors will be watching several cross-currents: continued earnings and guidance from big tech, data on consumer and enterprise IT spending, and any signals from central banks about rate trajectories that influence discount rates on long-duration growth stocks. The immediate takeaway is that market internals are diverging, and that sector rotation — not a uniform market sell-off — is the clearest story for traders and portfolio managers this week.