Here's how $10,000 invested in 2026 is performing in 5 key areas: Chart of the D

Markets have been anything but straightforward this year. Stocks have been hitting new records. But the war in Iran, rising inflation, and conflicting narratives over the AI trade have complicated the picture for investors.

Say you had $10,000 to invest on Jan. 2, the first trading day of the year. Had you invested that sum in a variety of major assets, here's where those bets would have left you at the end of the second quarter.

It may not be the sexiest bet in the book, but the S&P 500 (^GSPC), despite a ream of geopolitical and economic turmoils, has performed better so far in 2026 than many on Wall Street expected, returning roughly 9% in the face of what could've been a series of challenges.

Investors largely have the AI trade to thank. The outperformance of chip and memory stocks, powered by insatiable demand for AI development and ever-increasing compute capacity, has pulled up the entire US equity regime. If tech were stripped out, the S&P 500 would be largely flat.

Case in point: The Philadelphia Semiconductor Index (^SOX), which tracks a basket of chip-related securities, has returned 98.7% for investors, turning a $10,000 investment into $19,546.72.

The index's bigg

Fuente original: Yahoo Finance (https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/article/heres-how-10000-invested-in-2026-is-performing-in-5-key-areas-chart-of-the-day-100000294.html)