Good morning! Markets are mostly treading water ahead of Big Tech earnings on Wednesday, but stocks slipped slightly on Tuesday as oil once again hit $90 and chip momentum faded. 

The S&P 500 (^GSPC) fell 0.2%, the Nasdaq (^IXIC) 0.1%, and the Dow (^DJI) 0.6%.

What we're watching Tuesday: We've got a big day on the calendar as earnings season continues to broaden. Charles Schwab (SCHW), General Motors (GM) (preview here!), and Novartis AG (NVS) have our attention — even if the market is looking ahead to Wednesday's tech earnings.

Yahoo Finance Morning Brief is written by Ethan Wolff-Mann.

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Four Mag 7 heavy hitters at inauguration. (Julia Demaree Nikhinson - Pool/Getty Images)

It may be time to retire "Magnificent Seven" as a stand-in for "Big Tech," casting it away like the "FAANG" label of the 2010s.

Citi strategist Scott Chronert makes a convincing case that the AI revolution has evolved to include plenty of other companies that have been driving the market just as the Mag Seven did.

This isn't just about an arbitrary moniker: Analysts, investors, and strategists frequently use the shorthand S&P 493 and Mag Seven to call out and analyze the broader stock market and AI hypebeast.

Chronert says the grouping is misleading, particularly as the 493's strength is actually still coming from a "handful of ~mega-ish caps outside of the Mag 7" in the AI trade.

The fact that the Mag Seven is broken isn't news to any of us. Broadcom (AVGO), Micron (MU), AMD (AMD), and other chipmakers left off the list have been driving the market. 

You could add these to the basket, Chronert noted. But even this would miss some of the most important stocks. What about SpaceX? Is Apple even an AI company?

As our Brian Sozzi notes, the field may be open for a new Big Tech paradigm.

US President Donald Trump delivers remarks on reciprocal tariffs as US Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick holds a chart during an event in the Rose Garden entitled "Make America Wealthy Again" at the White House in Washington, DC, on April 2, 2025. (Photo by Brendan SMIALOWSKI / AFP)

High oil prices aren't the only thing that's coming back, tiptoeing behind markets ominously — tariff drama is set to make a return.

Friday will mark 150 days since President Trump's blanket 10% global tariffs were implemented after the Supreme Court struck down the previous version.

Wall Street generally expects a new version of tariffs to come back and, as Raymond James' team put it, "move ahead with reverse engineering" another round of reciprocal tariffs.

For businesses, this may mean another rush for fresh exceptions to fresh tariffs. There are two things we'd like to note. The first is that the trade war is still simmering, and businesses have been front-loading imports in response to the hodge-podge tariffs and general trade uncertainty.

But the other is that uncertainty is still a very real risk, even if trade war headline risk has mostly been cast aside. Just last week, Canada felt the heat of another tariff threat — this time over wildfires. Brazil just got slapped with a 25% duty. And then Canada got hit again on Monday with 50% levies on autos, dairy, and booze due to "continued discrimination."

Goldman's feeling bullish about real experiences. Like watching the F1 race cars zoom around Las Vegas. (Jeff Speer/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)

We're a day away from the true start of Big Tech earnings (Sorry to add insult to injury, Netflix). 

But Goldman Sachs analysts have noted that hedge funds have done a sharp pullback from US tech stocks over the past two months, ditching the sector at a record pace.

The why is a debatable combination of profit-taking and skepticism over AI-inflated valuations. But what's not debatable is just how much money has flowed out of the sector since early June.

The drama and volatility of owning tech stocks may also have pushed investors back into other corners of the market downstream of transformative AI companies and chipmakers. 

Which, if AI is truly as transformative as everyone hopes, should get transformed by a productivity boost as AI goes to work.

A different Goldman strategy team, led by Ben Snider, added to the discussion with a long list of other strategies in the "non-AI" realm that caught our attention. Interestingly, they touched firmly on a theme that really makes a lot of sense in an AI world: consumer experiences. People want real things, now more than ever.

Check out their big list.

Bloomberg, Yahoo Finance analysis (Jared Blikre)

We're in an earnings boom once again. And outlooks, measured by forward estimates of stock price-to-earnings ratios, have risen by about 32% from a year ago.

This isn't unheard of.

But growth like this almost always happens after a crash of some kind, which provides a favorable comparison point. It's easy to post big year-over-year results if your last year was abysmal.

Right now, however, outlooks are posting some huge numbers when compared to a reference point that was still pretty good.

For context here, the last two times we saw 30%+ forecasts for profit growth were after the financial crisis (after forecasts fell 38%) and after the pandemic (-22%). Today's rally made this happen with only a 6% dip in outlook. This is no rebound. 

As our Jared Blikre notes, the outlooks are skewed by tech's formidable market power. But all 11 S&P 500 sectors have positive outlooks, with eight expecting double-digit growth. 

The big takeaway here: Those expectations also make for quite the test as we get into the meat of this earnings season. The bar is high, and companies will have to deliver.