Magnificent 7
“Magnificent 7” is the collective name for seven US companies that have shaped the equity market of recent years: Microsoft, Apple, Nvidia, Alphabet, Amazon, Meta Platforms and Tesla. The label was coined on trading desks in 2023 and has no index provider behind it. It is a description, not a definition. There is no inclusion rule, no committee and no review date on which anyone checks the membership.
What the seven share is scale, a home market and a business built on computing, software and platforms. The rest differs: Nvidia sells chips, Alphabet and Meta advertising, Amazon retail and cloud, Apple devices, Microsoft enterprise software, Tesla cars. Treating them as one bet ignores that their prices do come apart under stress. The chart shows this once individual lines are hidden.
The flip side of their size matters just as much: in a broad index fund these seven names already account for a substantial share of the portfolio. Buying single stocks from the group on top of that doubles a position the fund already holds.
One detail on Alphabet: two share classes trade, GOOGL (class A, voting) and GOOG (class C, non-voting). This page uses GOOGL, so the index weight in the table covers that class alone. In the index itself, Alphabet sits somewhat higher across both classes.
Together the 7 names carry 31.8% of the S&P 500 — measured from the holdings of one representative index fund (SPYL). Anyone holding the index holds roughly a third of their equity side in these seven companies, intentionally or not.
Price Performance Compared
Magnificent 7 is the equal-weighted basket of the seven stocks: the same amount per name on the first shared trading day (Jul 11, 2024), no rebalancing afterwards. Within a shorter window the weights have therefore already drifted — the basket line is not the average of the seven percentages next to it. Deliberately not weighted by market capitalization — that would need share counts per date from a source we do not maintain. Price changes only, excluding dividends, taxes and costs.
The Seven Names
| Stock | Ticker | Sector | Weight S&P 500 | Volatility | Max drawdown | ETFs |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 Microsoft Corporation | MSFT | Information Technology | 5.93% | 28.0% | -34.9% | 28 |
 Apple Inc. | AAPL | Information Technology | 7.73% | 27.9% | -33.4% | 27 |
 NVIDIA Corporation | NVDA | Information Technology | 7.78% | 46.3% | -36.9% | 28 |
 Alphabet Inc. Class A | GOOGL | Communication Services | 2.86% | 31.2% | -29.9% | 25 |
 Amazon.com Inc. | AMZN | Consumer Discretionary | 3.71% | 33.9% | -30.9% | 24 |
 Meta Platforms Inc Class A | META | Communication Services | 2.16% | 38.6% | -34.2% | 23 |
 Tesla Inc. | TSLA | Consumer Discretionary | 1.60% | 59.3% | -53.8% | 24 |
| Magnificent 7 | – | Basket, equal-weighted | 31.8% | 27.5% | -31.6% | – |
Magnificent 7 Patents
In the 52 weekly issues of the US patent office from Oct 28, 2025 to Oct 20, 2026, the US patent office granted 320,362 utility patents. The companies in the table received 8,901 of them, or 2.8%. Apple is in first place with 2,274.
| Company | Utility patents | Share | Design patents | Top technology field | Filing to grant |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Apple | 2,274 | 0.71% | 769 | G06F Electric digital data processing (22%) | 2.8 yrs |
| Alphabet | 1,898 | 0.59% | 210 | G06F Electric digital data processing (29%) | 2.7 yrs |
| Microsoft | 1,694 | 0.53% | 13 | G06F Electric digital data processing (47%) | 2.6 yrs |
| Amazon | 1,485 | 0.46% | 100 | G06F Electric digital data processing (28%) | 2.7 yrs |
| NVIDIA | 1,068 | 0.33% | 2 | G06F Electric digital data processing (29%) | 3.0 yrs |
| Meta Platforms | 398 | 0.12% | 40 | G06F Electric digital data processing (19%) | 2.7 yrs |
| Tesla | 84 | 0.026% | 7 | H01M Batteries and fuel cells (13%) | 3.4 yrs |
Share: the company's utility patents divided by all utility patents in those issues. Technology field: CPC subclass of the main classification, with its share of the company's utility patents in brackets. Filing to grant: median in years across patents with a known filing date. As of the issue of Oct 20, 2026.
The individual grants with title, filing date and technology field are in the patent screener; more on the topic on the M&A and patents page.