Vanguard Total Stock Market ETF Sees Strong Inflows Amid Tech Focus

Vanguard Total Stock Market ETF ( $VTI ) has fallen by 0.61% in the past week. It has experienced a 5-day net inflow of $982.71 million.
This is due, in part, to market sentiment on some of the ETF’s largest holdings. For example:

• Apple Inc remains a core, but increasingly debated, AI-era holding as its share price has jumped more than 32% over the past six months on strong iPhone 17 demand and high‑margin Services growth, pushing the stock to about 31x projected FY 2027 earnings, above its five‑year average and prompting some analysts, such as Raymond James’ Srini Pajjuri, to stay on the sidelines with Hold ratings. Strategically, Apple is doubling down on its tightly integrated hardware–services ecosystem, with reports of a higher‑end AirPods Pro 3 arriving later this year featuring infrared cameras and “Visual Intelligence” for AI‑driven context awareness and possible hand‑gesture controls, echoing broader industry trends in wearables. At the same time, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has openly cast Apple as his key long‑term rival and is testing an “app‑less” ChatGPT experience that could bypass the App Store, though early implementations are clunky and still redirect users back to web pages, underscoring that Apple’s position as the main gateway to digital services is intact for now. Overall, Wall Street maintains a Moderate Buy view on AAPL with an average target around $299 per share, implying roughly 9%–11% upside, reflecting confidence in Apple’s cash‑generating ecosystem but growing scrutiny of how much more investors should pay for its AI and hardware upgrade story from here.
• Nvidia Corporation heads into 2026 as the market’s preferred pure play on AI infrastructure, with demand signals still accelerating rather than cooling, highlighted by reports that TikTok owner ByteDance plans to spend about $14 billion on Nvidia AI chips in 2026, subject to U.S. export approvals. To capture this momentum, Nvidia is pushing Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing to ramp output of its H200 data‑center chips, particularly for newly permitted exports to China, and is set to benefit from what could be multi‑billion‑dollar incremental revenue as Chinese tech giants place large orders and supply constraints ease over the next 18–24 months. Strategically, the planned $20 billion acquisition of AI‑chip startup Groq deepens Nvidia’s push into low‑latency inference with Groq’s Language Processing Units, complementing its dominant training GPUs and signaling that inference has matured into a large, distinct profit pool; CEO Jensen Huang is expected to emphasize data centers, “physical AI,” robotics and platforms like Cosmos at CES 2026, reinforcing Nvidia’s role at the center of the AI build‑out. Despite export‑control and competitive risks from AMD and others, NVDA stock, which gained about 35% in 2025 and still trades roughly 12% below its 52‑week high, carries a Strong Buy consensus and an average price target near $262.79—implying around 41% upside—as Wall Street continues to treat Nvidia as the primary vehicle for investors seeking exposure to the next leg of AI‑driven semiconductor growth.
• Microsoft enters 2026 with fundamentals that look stronger than its recent share‑price performance—about a 15% gain in 2025, slightly behind the S&P 500—suggesting a potential opportunity for investors who believe the payoff from its heavy AI spending is close at hand. The company has poured roughly $69 billion (about 24% of revenue) into AI and cloud infrastructure over the past year, raising near‑term questions about capital returns, yet a massive commercial cloud backlog of around $392 billion, up 51% year‑on‑year, indicates that much of this capacity is already backed by contracted demand for Azure and AI services built in partnership with OpenAI. Importantly, Microsoft has managed to keep gross margins in the upper‑60% range and operating margins in the mid‑to‑high 40s even during this investment peak, while valuation multiples have quietly compressed to roughly 30x forward earnings and about 11x forward sales—toward the low end of its three‑year range and well below prior AI‑driven peaks—setting the stage for a re‑rating if Azure can sustain high‑30% to ~40% growth and capital intensity begins to moderate. Ownership remains broad and institutional support strong, with Vanguard, major ETFs and prominent hedge funds treating the stock as a long‑term AI compounder, and Wall Street is overwhelmingly positive: 32 of 34 analysts rate MSFT a Buy with an average target near $631 per share, implying around 30%–33% upside as Microsoft shifts from AI build‑out to harvest and seeks to convert its record CapEx into faster earnings growth in 2026 and beyond.