February 2026 in returns

February deepened January's split rather than resolving it. Crypto took a second consecutive beating — Bitcoin down 15.0%, Ethereum 19.9% and Solana 20.1%, with just 53 of 194 coins (27%) green — and gold rose another 8.7%, the same defensive pairing as the month before. US equities stalled at the index level, the S&P 500 slipping 0.9% and the Nasdaq 3.4%, but the damage was concentrated rather than general: 580 of 870 stocks (67%) still finished higher. The strength was abroad, where Japan's Nikkei gained 10.4%, the FTSE 100 6.7% and Germany's DAX 3.0% — a reminder that a soft month for American indices is not the same as a soft month for equities.

The more telling detail was where the AI trade had moved. Nvidia fell 7.3% while the companies that supply the physical layer around it ran hard: Lumentum gained 78.9%, Corning 45.9%, Keysight 42.1%, Ciena 38.5% and Vertiv 36.9% — optics, glass, test equipment and the power and cooling that data centres cannot be built without. Add Texas Pacific Land (+50.5%) and Ubiquiti (+39.2%) and the theme is consistent: money was paying for the picks and shovels beneath the picks and shovels, one layer further from the chip designer whose name was on the story. The losers were an unsentimental mix of expensive growth and single-name disappointment — Novo Nordisk (-37.0%), Atlassian (-36.4%, punished for a second straight month), CoStar (-27.4%), Zscaler (-26.5%) and Ares Management (-25.2%). Two months in, the market had already decided it would rather own the infrastructure than the software running on it.