Software stocks just delivered their best week in 25 years, surging like they remembered what growth feels like. The iShares Expanded Tech-Software Sector ETF (IGV) rocketed nearly 14%, handily beating the semiconductor crowd’s 7.5% rise and flipping from tech’s sleepy underperformer to the belle of the trading ball in just five trading days.
Investors who had written off cloud and SaaS names as yesterday’s news suddenly found their portfolios looking a lot perkier. The shift feels like the sector finally got the memo that semis can’t hog the spotlight forever.
Oracle led the charge with a jaw-dropping 25%+ jump, while RingCentral, Datadog, Snowflake, Shopify, Atlassian, and ServiceNow each climbed 15% or more. These aren’t gentle nudges—they’re the kind of moves that make portfolio managers spill their coffee and double-check their screens.
Microsoft, the steady giant of the group, posted its best week since the 2020 pandemic panic lows and even flirted with its 100-day moving average. Yet it still trades 24% below its all-time high, the most distant of any Magnificent Seven stock. The rest of the software pack tells a similar tale: big weekly pops, but many names remain well off their peaks.
Over the broader 13-day rally from late March, the picture stays mixed. Snowflake sits down about 6%, with ServiceNow, HubSpot, and Intuit also nursing single-digit losses. Salesforce managed a 10% weekly gain but still hovers slightly negative on the longer stretch.
This rebound is broad enough to notice and strong enough to spark fresh chatter around software valuations. It suggests investors are once again willing to pay up for higher-growth cloud names after months of caution. Yet it stops short of a complete repair job, leaving the sector with plenty of room—and curiosity—for what comes next.
The sudden baton pass from semiconductors to software has traders buzzing. After lagging badly, the group reminded everyone that even the most patient rebound can arrive with serious energy when sentiment shifts.
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