Goldman Sachs: The Nasdaq is testing a key benchmark trend line, and the SOX’s decline is comparable to the dot-com bubble burst and the 2008 financial crisis.

Goldman Sachs’ Chief Expert for Technology, Media & Telecom, Peter Callahan, explicitly noted in his latest weekly report that the Nasdaq 100 index is retesting a key benchmark trend line connecting the April 2025 low and March 2026 low. Its closing price of around 26,630 last Thursday landed almost exactly on that line; driven by a rebound in semiconductor stocks, the index closed at 26,990 on Friday, just about 1% above the trend line, and still over 14% below its October 6 all-time high of 31,361. Callahan wrote that the significance of this level is hard to overstate. If the trend line breaks, his charts show the next clear support level is around 23,000 near the March 2026 low, representing another roughly 15% drop from current levels. Meanwhile, market extreme sentiment indicators have all turned red: last Thursday saw the largest single-day put option volume in Chicago Board Options Exchange (CBOE) history, and the realized volatility of Goldman Sachs’ flagship semiconductor stock basket surged to 93, its highest level since April this year. The Nasdaq 100 index fell about 5% last week, marking its fourth consecutive weekly decline. The Philadelphia Semiconductor Index (SOX) has dropped 28% cumulatively over the past 22 trading days; Callahan notes that only a handful of instances since 1997 have seen a comparable rate of decline, including the dot-com bubble burst, the 2008 global financial crisis, and the COVID-19 pandemic shock. Callahan’s description of current sentiment is unvarnished: "It’s hard to overstate how tough the market is" — while bottom-up data points such as memory pricing, computing power pricing, supply-demand visibility, and third-quarter earnings remain strong, the AI and semiconductor sectors have entered a "rolling bear market" since this summer, having fallen roughly 40% from their peaks, and macro uncertainty surrounding policy and congressional developments is "impossible to model".