June 13 (Reuters) - SpaceX roared into markets this past week with a valuation of more than $2 trillion, surpassing two members of Wall Street's "Magnificent Seven" and raising a key question: Does the Mag 7 name still fit? And if not, what should replace it?
The IPO, the biggest in U.S. history, vaulted SpaceX's value above two Mag 7 members: CEO Elon Musk's other company, Tesla, and Meta Platforms. With trillion-dollar contenders such as OpenAI and Anthropic waiting in the IPO wings, the club may soon need a name change, analysts said.
With SpaceX's arrival, "it becomes very hard to keep using Mag 7 as the clean shorthand for market leadership because one of the most important companies in the world would immediately be outside the label," said Shay Boloor, chief market strategist at Futurum Equities.
These groupings are not formal market categories, but shorthand labels coined by strategists, investors and the media to capture the hottest big stocks at a given moment. Such monikers have a long history, ranging from the "Nifty 50" of the 1960s and 1970s to the "Four Horsemen" of the late 1990s dot-com boom.
The SpaceX IPO has set off a race to devise the next cool acronym.
One sobriquet gaining traction on X is "MANGOS", which stands for Meta, Anthropic, Nvidia, Alphabet, OpenAI and SpaceX. That grouping is far from standardized, with some interpreting the "A" as Apple, currently the third most-valuable U.S.-listed firm.
"We are already referring to it internally and the industry is picking up on it as well," said Aga Kuplinska, SVP of product development at Tidal Financial Group, which helps asset managers roll out ETFs.
Dan Boardman-Weston, CEO at BRI Wealth Management, is going another way, suggesting "Magna Atoms" - the Magnificent Seven plus SpaceX, OpenAI and Anthropic.
THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN RIDE
The "Magnificent Seven" term was coined by BofA Global Research Chief Investment Strategist Michael Hartnett in late 2023 to describe seven heavyweight technology-related stocks: Nvidia, Apple, Amazon, Alphabet, Meta, Tesla and Microsoft.
With an AI boom driving stock markets to record highs and the sudden appearance of new trillion-dollar companies, the leaderboard is often in a state of flux.
In a May 22 note, BofA wrote about the "AI Big 10," adding Broadcom, Micron Technology and Advanced Micro Devices to the original seven, reflecting the semiconductor rally of the past year. That group accounts for more than 40% of the S&P 500's weight, according to LSEG data.
The labels have evolved before - from FANG to FAANG to the Magnificent Seven - each tracking shifts in companies that led the market.
FANG covered Facebook, Amazon, Netflix and Google. FAANG added Apple, and Magnificent Seven dropped Netflix while adding Microsoft, Nvidia and Tesla, each shift reflecting changes at the top of the market.
"It's been Mag 7 for several years now. Maybe the markets are excited for something new," said Dustin Thackeray, chief investment officer at Crewe Advisors.
To be sure, not everyone expects the old label to ride off into the sunset.
"The Magnificent Seven label is not going away," said Dave Mazza, CEO of Roundhill Investments. "It is too embedded in how investors and the media view large-cap tech leadership. What you will likely see is additive terminology rather than replacement."
(Reporting by Shashwat Chauhan, Purvi Agarwal, Twesha Dikshit and Niket Nishant in Bengaluru; Editing by Sweta Singh, Colin Barr, Saumyadeb Chakrabarty and David Gaffen)
