U.S. stock futures slump as investors digest ongoing tech selloff

Mike Murphy

Tue, February 17, 2026 at 1:01 PM GMT+9 3 min read

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All three major U.S. stock indexes ended lower last week. - AFP via Getty Images

U.S. stock futures turned lower Monday night, following another brutal week for tech stocks.

Dow Jones Industrial Average futures YM00 erased initial gains and were last down more than 160 points, or 0.3%. S&P 500 futures ES00 were down 0.5% while Nasdaq-100 futures NQ00 tumbled 0.9%.

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Gold GC00 and silver SI00 futures fell on Monday, while bitcoin remained below the $70,000 level. Crude oil futures CL.1 rose more than 1% as investors remain anxious over possible U.S. military action against Iran.

Markets closed mostly higher Friday, though all three major U.S. stock indexes ended the week lower as fears of potential future AI disruptions continued to weigh heavily on tech stocks. The Dow DJIA fell 1.2%, its worst week since November, while the S&P 500 SPX slid 1.4% and the Nasdaq COMP slumped 2.1%, extending its losing streak to five weeks — its longest since 2002. U.S. markets were closed Monday for the Presidents Day holiday.

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That came after a tame inflation report Friday that showed prices rose less than expected in January, a potentially encouraging sign for Fed officials considering future interest-rate cuts. The report raised hopes that the U.S. economy may yet pull out a rare soft landing — that is, cutting inflation to the Fed’s 2% annual target while avoiding a recession in doing so.

Read more: U.S. economy suddenly seems on track for fabled soft landing: 2% inflation without a recession

The coming week will see the release Wednesday of the Fed’s minutes from their last meeting, and another key inflation reading — the core personal-consumption expenditures index — on Friday.

Meanwhile, fourth-quarter earnings season is wrapping up. And while more companies have been beating earnings expectations, that hasn’t done much to boost the stock market, as worries about both artificial-intelligence spending and AI’s potentially disruptive effects on certain industries — especially software — have sharply shifted investors’ sentiment.

Also see: How the riptide around AI and stocks could seep into Fed decisions and the housing market

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“It is software eating itself,” Stephen Innes, managing partner at SPI Asset Management, said in a weekend note, noting that the software and services sector of the S&P 500 is down 27% since late October. He said many software companies became dramatically overvalued in recent years, “on the assumption that margins would stay stratospheric forever.”

However, “If AI compresses those margins even modestly, the equity math changes violently. A few turns off the multiple at elevated starting valuations is not a trim. It is an amputation,” Innes said.

This week should be quieter on the earnings front, as investors await earnings from AI bellwether Nvidia NVDA the following week. The coming week will see earnings reports from Walmart WMT, Door Dash DASH, Wayfair W, Palo Alto Networks PANW and Live Nation Entertainment LYV, among others.

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