The significance of JPMorgan's latest call is not the forecast itself but what it says about the market's centre of gravity.
The bank's equity strategists, led by Mislav Matejka, told clients that technology shares are not likely to be the main drivers of markets in the second half of the year.
That is a pointed thing for the largest US bank to say about the sector that has powered almost every rally since the artificial intelligence boom began.
It amounts to an argument that the leadership which defined 2025 is not built to repeat, and that investors should look elsewhere.
Problem is the spending
The reasoning matters more than the prediction, because of what the strategists chose to flag.
Their central worry is hyperscaler capital spending, the enormous sums the largest cloud companies are pouring into data centres and chips to run AI.
That anxiety has become the fault line running through the entire market, the question of whether that spending will ever earn a return.
For months the bulls argued the money was justified by demand, and JPMorgan is now signalling that patience is thinning.
When investors start treating capital expenditure as a risk rather than a sign of ambition, the companies doing the spending lose the benefit of the doubt.
Bar already slipping
The strategists frame this partly as a problem of arithmetic.
Technology led so decisively in the second half of 2025 that simply matching that performance would require another extraordinary run, a high bar the sector may not clear.
There is already evidence the advantage is fading, with the gap between the biggest technology stocks and the rest of the market having narrowed sharply.
That convergence is the practical basis for the call, since a market where everything rises together no longer rewards concentrating in a handful of giants.
The rational response, JPMorgan suggests, is breadth, spreading exposure across the market rather than betting on the same few names that carried last year.
Investors cooling on AI
The note does not sit in isolation, and that is what gives it weight.
Other voices at the bank have turned more selective, with strategist Michael Cembalest described as adopting a cautious posture on AI-related equities.
When a research house's macro strategists and its market strategists drift towards the same wariness, it reads less like a single trade and more like a house view forming.
The shift is subtle, a move from enthusiasm to discrimination rather than outright bearishness, but the direction is unmistakable.
The firms still expected to deliver on AI will be backed, and the rest will be scrutinised on whether the spending pays.
Follow the money
There is a revealing coda in the bank's own behaviour.
JPMorgan separately said it plans to deploy $750 billion into housing through 2035, a reminder that the largest pools of capital are being committed well outside technology.
That juxtaposition, caution on tech equities alongside a vast long-term bet on housing, captures the mood the strategists are describing.
The AI trade is not being abandoned, but it is being demoted from the only story in the market to one story among several.
For investors who spent a year being told technology was the whole game, the message from JPMorgan is that the game has widened, and the easy concentration that paid off in 2025 is unlikely to work twice.
