A tech bust gave way to a broader rally. What comes next could be ugly.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. Buy the dip? For most of the past week, that referred almost entirely to the salsa, guacamole, and blue cheese dressing for Super Bowl snacks. For stocks, cryptocurrencies, precious metals, and other risky assets, investors were more inclined to sell first and ask questions later.

That is, until Friday, when a mood reversal lifted the Dow Jones Industrial Average past the 50,000 mark for the first time. Once again, artificial intelligence was at the center of the selloff, amid worries that software would be made superfluous by Anthropic’s Claude applications. That was reminiscent of the slide that occurred almost exactly a year ago when DeepSeek from China offered a credible AI alternative at a fraction of the cost of OpenAI’s ChatGPT.

Memories of the eventual recovery from that rout had the dip buyers returning on Friday, causing a boisterous 2% bounce in the S&P 500 index, the biggest daily gain since last May; that pared the week’s loss to 0.1%. But well before the past week’s gyrations, the stock market’s character already had undergone a significant transformation, one that resembled what followed the dot-com boom at the end of the last century: Technology stocks ceded their leadership to a broader swath of the market. Sound familiar? Back then, the equal-weighted S&P 500 surpassed the more familiar capitalization-weighted benchmark, with a 10.7% gain from the tech-stock peak on March 27, 2000, through the end of that year; the cap-weighted index fell 13.4%, according to a client note from Deutsche Bank strategist Jim Reid.

Similarly, since last Oct. 29 through Feb. 4, the equal-weighted S&P 500 gained 6.3% while the cap-weighted S&P was off 0.1%, amid a dramatic rotation.