

Why Nvidia and other AI stocks have lost their ‘quality’ status
Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. Are the big AI companies giving up their status as the highest caliber stocks in the market? The question is at the heart of a debate about “quality" companies that has left two popular ETFs with wildly different performance after one ditched Nvidia and most of the rest of Big Tech. The $48 billion iShares MSCI USA Quality Factor (ticker: QUAL) and Invesco’s $15 billion S&P 500 Quality (SPHQ) specialize in what the investment industry has dubbed quality companies.
The exchange-traded funds invest only in companies that show they are safe and steady on financial measures including high profitability and low leverage. The benchmarks that these two ETFs use to measure quality have a crucial difference, which leads to one having much more exposure to the major artificial-intelligence stocks. QUAL, which bases its definition of quality on an MSCI index, has almost a third of its holdings in five of the leading eight Big Tech stocks.
SPHQ, which is based on an S&P index, holds only one, Apple. The result has been wild swings in performance. Up to June, when Invesco dropped Nvidia, SPHQ beat QUAL by the most in any six-month period.
In the past six months SPHQ has lagged behind by the most, aside from the period immediately after QUAL got going in 2013. This is much more than a semantic debate between ETFs about what quality means. It goes to the heart of a much bigger question in markets: Is the bet on AI being made by the country’s biggest companies a vast potential profit pool or a money pit that should be sounding alarm bells? In addition to Nvidia, SPHQ dropped Meta and Netflix in June, and Microsoft last December.
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