Key insights
- Semiconductors are strongly outperforming software in the short term, with Intel breaking multi-decade highs. This suggests continued strength in the tech sector, particularly in hardware. Bank of America's "permanent portfolio" allocation strategy is also mentioned, though its direct market impact is less immediate.
Yahoo Finance Markets and Data Editor Jared Blikre takes a look at the software sector (IGV), semiconductor sector (SOXX), and Bank of America's (BAC) "permanent portfolio" through the years.
Let's just take a deep dive into the semiconductors. This is what's happening today. I want to show you uh oh, first I got to hit Intel because Intel is up 21% looking like the best day since 1987 and that is after it cleared its all-time highs yesterday. These are the 2000 highs. Guess what? That is in the history book. So we're looking at a close over those highs today. But I did want to show you what's happening over the five days here and some of the leaders are just out of sight. Arm up 40%, AMD up uh just shy of 24%, and then the list goes down. Not too many losers here. And then in software this week, it is a very different picture. You got some winners, you got some losers, uh but one thing I was looking at in particular here, I'm going to show you a comparison between IGV, that's a software ETF, and the Sox, that's a semiconductor ETF. So this is over one week. You can see software has just climbed into the green for the week, up about 20 1/5th of 1%. And then we have semiconductors up 11%. And so this has kind of been the playbook this year. However, I was pointing out a few weeks ago when when uh software stocks finally perked up, it looked like they wanted to uh lead for a little bit. That was a one-year chart. We're going to dial this back down to a one-month chart, but software is taking a little bit of a back seat again. So you can see over the trailing month, semiconductors up 35% versus 5% in software. So Semi's uh definitely taking the baton once again. I wanted to close here with uh something a little bit different. Um, this is called the permanent portfolio. This chart comes via B of A and Michael Hartnett's team over there at Bank of America. This goes back all the way one century and a permanent portfolio as it's called is 1/4 cash, 1/4 commodities, 1/4 stocks, 1/4 bonds. So, it's pretty balanced there and that is stands in comparison to the standard 60-40 portfolio that only has stocks and bonds. So this uh permanent portfolio has uh cash and it also has a little bit of commodities, everything equal weighted. The point is, guess what? In 2026, we are tracking the best returns since 1933. So, we've been talking about 60-40 on these programs for a while. A lot of uh analysts have said 60-40 is dead and why it's important to have other things in your port portfolio. Well, cash and commodities added to the mix is doing it. Uh pretty much the best returns that we've seen in 90 years.