Strong earnings results buoyed the market. Both the S&P 500 and the Nasdaq were up slightly less than 1% on the week. While the Nasdaq sold off early in the week on reports that OpenAI was missing certain internal revenue targets, strong earnings from tech companies later in the week (notably Alphabet) offset earnings-related declines in Microsoft and Meta to leave the index in positive territory. The S&P also gained from strong earnings results, with Caterpillar a key standout. Our NPM Private Market Tracker*, which shows the average price performance of the 50 largest names in our internal Tape D® data, is up 15.3% YTD versus the S&P 500/Nasdaq up 5.1%/7.1%. (Bloomberg; NPM)

YTD Roundup

We’re four months into 2026 and, between war and investors’ love-hate relationship with AI, there have been a lot of moving pieces in equity markets. This week we dig into YTD public and private market and sector performance and some of the trends we’re watching.

A wild ride for public equities so far. The US market began the year looking expensive from a multiple perspective: The S&P 500 was trading at a forward price-to-earnings (P/E) ratio of 22x, similar to the multiple it reached in the bull market of 2021 and slight below the 24x seen in 2000 (Goldman Sachs). Nevertheless, outlooks for performance were bullish, with major US banks expecting the S&P to return ~5-15% for the year (CNN).

Then came the Saaspocalypse — a widespread concern that AI would upend the business models for enterprise software companies such as Atlassian, ServiceNow, Workday, Snowflake and Salesforce. These and other large software names saw their share prices decline by 30-50% and have not yet fully recovered (Bloomberg). After that came the war with Iran — a boon for energy producers (Brent crude prices surged over 25% in the early days of Operation Epic Fury), but a threat to for consumers of crude products, chemicals and fertilizers. Punctuating these events have been gyrating views on the AI trade. The Mag 7 represent ~40% of the S&P 500’s market cap and ~30% of its earnings (Goldman Sachs), so bullish or bearish sentiment on AI in a given week can have a large impact on the broader market.

Public markets have been able to navigate this volatility well, perhaps to the surprise of some observers. Two months into the war, the S&P/Nasdaq are up 5%/7% YTD and up 8%/11% from their March troughs. This has been driven largely by strong corporate earnings and resilient consumer spending. On the earnings front, 1Q2026 is shaping up to be one of the best earnings seasons in years, with EPS on pace to rise 19% and net profit margins their highest in 15 years (Wall Street Journal). Consumers appear to be digesting higher commodity prices, aided by April tax refunds and strong equity markets that have supported spending from wealthier Americans (NPR, Moody’s).

Private markets benefiting from up-rounds and IPO anticipation. The top 50 names in our internal Tape D data are up 15% YTD, far outpacing public equity markets. One reason for this relatively strong performance is liquidity. Private equity markets are not nearly as liquid as public markets, so trading may not occur often enough to reflect rapid changes in sentiment or geopolitical events. Market breadth is another reason. For example, our universe of larger private companies does not have a heavy weighting towards large software companies, so it did not experience a Saaspocalypse. This is in contrast to private credit markets, where weakness among software companies has had a significant impact (Bloomberg). The equity in these companies is often held by private equity firms and does not trade. Our universe also does not have an energy sector, so volatility has been removed on both the upside and the downside.

What’s behind the very strong performance in private markets YTD? First, several companies have taken advantage of tailwinds in defense, space and AI to raise capital at materially higher levels than their most recent rounds. Cerebras (+153% YTD), OpenEvidence (+77%), Saronic, (+39%), Clickhouse (+76%) and Replit (+55%) are a few of the companies who closed rounds during the first four months of the year that were at least 2x where their previous rounds had priced. In addition to this, investor anticipation of IPOs has boosted shares in companies who might IPO — SpaceX shares are up 13% YTD and Cerebras’ S-1 filing has also helped performance. Positive momentum behind AI is a final factor, with Anthropic (+47% YTD) being a beneficiary.

Concentration is a key similarity in markets, and a potential source of risk. Both public and private markets are dominated by a few behemoths. We mentioned above that the Magnificent 7 represent 40% of the S&P 500’s market cap. Strong tech earnings and AI momentum have shielded the broader public market from geopolitical risk even as companies exposed to commodity price inputs and broader consumer spending have flagged weakness (Bloomberg). The consumer spending that has been resilient is driven by a small percentage of the population — the top 20% of earners in America account for 60% of personal spending (NPR, Moody’s), and they themselves have been buoyed by strong equity returns which have created some circular risk in the economy. As many investors are also likely aware, capital spending on AI dominates capital spending in the broader economy. After this past week’s earnings, Microsoft, Meta, Amazon and Alphabet are slated to spend $700 billion on capex this year (New York Times) and over $1 trillion in 2027 (CNBC). However, 1Q GDP numbers came in this past week as well, and outside of software and computing investment (+24% yoy), all other business investment contracted (Barron’s).

Private markets are even more concentrated. The top three companies in our internal Tape D market tracker — SpaceX, OpenAI and Anthropic — represent 64% of the market cap for the top 100 largest names. Include Stripe and Databricks, and the top five companies represent 71% of total market cap.

While OpenAI’s share price has been lackluster this year, positive performances from SpaceX, Anthropic and Stripe have been major factors in private market performance.

The IPOs potentially slated for 2026 and 2027, which include SpaceX, OpenAI and Anthropic will have an interesting impact on private market dynamics. If all three come to fruition, they would dramatically reduce the concentration in private markets, giving smaller companies and a wider variety of sectors the chance to influence market direction.

Based on our proprietary Tape D® data, the best performers of the large cap names in the private market thus far in 2026 have been:

Based on our proprietary Tape D® data using weighted averages for each sector, the top performing sectors YTD are Consumer (30%), Healthcare (+21%), Fintech (+13%), and Industrials (+13%). The concentration we described above is evident in sector performance, where Whoop drives performance in Consumer, OpenEvidence drives Healthcare, Stripe drives Fintech and SpaceX drives Industrials.

• The UAE announced that it will leave OPEC (Wall Street Journal, 4/29).
• OpenAI has missed some internal targets for revenue and new users; shares of its partners Oracle, CoreWeave and SoftBank slipped as a result. (Wall Street Journal, 4/28).
• Google will invest up to $40 billion ($10 billion initially) in Anthropic at a $350 billion valuation. Google will also supply five GW of compute to Anthropic starting next year (The Information, 4/27).
• Microsoft and OpenAI restructured their partnership again, eliminating OpenAI’s exclusivity agreement with Microsoft Azure and capping Microsoft’s revenue sharing agreement (Pitchbook, 4/28).
• The Pentagon tapped 12 companies to build the space-based interceptor (SBI) component of Golden Dome. The 12 are: Anduril Industries, Booz Allen Hamilton, General Dynamics Mission Systems, GITAI, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Quindar, RTX Raytheon, Sci-Tec, SpaceX, True Anomaly and Turion Space (Payload, 4/27).
• Wisconsin’s utility commissioners announced strengthened safeguards to ensure that large data center customers pay all of the costs for new power built to serve them (The Information, 4/27).
• Related Digital and Blackstone finalized financing for a $16 billion Oracle data center campus in Michigan, with debt financing anchored by PIMCO (The Information, 4/27).
• The FCC dismissed bids by SpaceX, AST SpaceMobile and others to access mobile satellite service (MSS) spectrum. This cements certainty for existing spectrum owners such as Globalstar (which Amazon announced plans to acquire a couple of weeks ago) and Iridium (Space News, 4/23).
• T-Mobile said that its Starlink service is seeing less usage than expected (The Information, 4/30).
• China blocked Meta’s $2 billion acquisition of Manus (Wall Street Journal, 4/27).

• Hawkeye 360, a provider of satellite-based signals intelligence for US government agencies, is seeking to raise $416 million in an IPO that could value the company at as much as $2.4 billion (Bloomberg, 4/27).
• Canadian AI lab Cohere will acquire German AI lab Aleph Alpha for an undisclosed price (The Information, 4/27).
• Csquare, a Dallas-based co-location and data center services provider backed by Brookfield Infrastructure Partners, confidentially filed for an IPO (Pitchbook, 4/27).