Invesco QQQ Trust Sees Strong Inflows Amid Tech Volatility

Invesco QQQ Trust ( $QQQ ) has fallen by 1.25% in the past week. It has experienced a 5-day net inflow of $3.51 billion.
This is due, in part, to market sentiment on some of the ETF’s largest holdings. For example:

• Nvidia Corporation remains the market’s flagship AI play heading into 2026, with fresh demand signals and strategic moves reinforcing its leadership. TikTok parent ByteDance is reportedly preparing to spend about $14 billion on Nvidia AI chips in 2026, a potential multibillion‑dollar revenue driver that highlights how central Nvidia’s GPUs remain to global AI infrastructure, especially in China. To keep up, Nvidia has asked TSMC to ramp production of its H200 data‑center chips, with extra capacity expected by mid‑2026, just as U.S. regulators have cleared H200 exports to China. The company is also pushing deeper into low‑latency AI inference through a planned $20 billion acquisition of Groq’s assets, giving it access to the startup’s Language Processing Unit technology and senior talent. CEO Jensen Huang is set to spotlight data centers, robotics, and “physical AI” at CES 2026, themes that could sustain investor excitement. Despite a roughly 35% gain in 2025, Nvidia trades about 12% below its 52‑week high, and Wall Street still assigns a Strong Buy rating, with an average price target around $262.79 implying roughly 41% upside as investors bet the AI build‑out has years to run.
• Apple Inc is balancing robust business momentum with mounting questions over valuation and rising competitive threats in AI. The stock has climbed more than 32% in six months, powered by strong iPhone 17 demand and a fast‑growing Services segment, and Apple continues to deepen its hardware‑services ecosystem with premium, AI‑enhanced devices. New rumors suggest a higher‑end version of AirPods Pro 3 later this year, featuring infrared cameras to enable “Visual Intelligence” and possibly hand‑gesture controls, allowing Apple to layer more AI‑driven features onto familiar products and justify higher pricing. At the same time, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is openly positioning Apple as his main long‑term rival and is testing an “app‑less” ChatGPT experience that could bypass the App Store’s gatekeeping role, though early integrations remain clunky and add friction for users. On Wall Street, Apple is widely viewed as a high‑quality core holding but no longer cheap: the shares trade at about 31 times projected FY 2027 earnings, above their five‑year average, prompting Raymond James to resume coverage at Hold and warning that rich valuation may cap near‑term upside. Even so, the broader Street maintains a Moderate Buy rating and an average target near $299 per share, implying around 9%–11% potential upside as investors weigh premium pricing power and a massive 2.4‑billion‑device installed base against slower hardware cycles and China‑related risks.
• Microsoft heads into 2026 with fundamentals that look stronger than its recent share‑price performance, creating an appealing setup for long‑term investors who believe in the AI theme. After an AI‑driven surge in earlier years, the stock gained only about 15% in 2025, roughly matching the S&P 500, even as revenue grew in the high teens and earnings per share rose more than 20%. The market’s hesitation centers on Microsoft’s aggressive capital spending—about $69 billion over the past year, or roughly 24% of revenue—to build out AI and cloud infrastructure, and uncertainty over how quickly those investments will pay off. However, a commercial cloud backlog of roughly $392 billion, up 51% year‑on‑year, shows that much of the new capacity is already backed by customer contracts, while gross margins in the upper‑60% range and operating margins in the mid‑to‑high 40s remain exceptionally strong. If Azure can sustain high‑30% to 40% growth, capital spending rises more slowly than revenue, and margins begin to expand again, analysts see room for a valuation “re‑rating” from current levels around 30 times forward earnings and roughly 11 times forward sales, near the low end of its three‑year range. Ownership is broad and deep—public investors hold over 40%, with major stakes from Vanguard and large ETFs—and Wall Street is overwhelmingly bullish, with a Strong Buy consensus and an average price target near $631 implying about 30%–33% upside as Microsoft transitions from an AI “build‑out” phase to harvesting returns on its infrastructure.