Software rebound, uneven gains

Software stocks just logged their best week in about 25 years, but the rebound split sharply between winners and laggards. (finance.yahoo.com) The iShares Expanded Tech-Software Sector ETF, known as IGV, climbed about 14% for the week ended April 17, beating the iShares Semiconductor ETF’s roughly 7.5% gain. IGV still showed a negative year-to-date return of about 20.18% on Yahoo Finance as of April 17. (finance.yahoo.com 1) (finance.yahoo.com 2) Yahoo Finance said Oracle rose more than 25% in the week, while RingCentral, Datadog, Snowflake, Shopify, Atlassian, and ServiceNow each gained 15% or more. Microsoft had its best week since the March 2020 pandemic low, yet it still sat 24% below its all-time high. (finance.yahoo.com) That gap is the point of the move: prices rose fast, but many large software names remain well below prior peaks. Yahoo Finance said Snowflake was still down about 6% from its 52-week high, while ServiceNow, HubSpot, and Intuit were also down single digits, and Salesforce was slightly negative over the full 13-day rally from the March 30 low. (finance.yahoo.com) The bounce followed a brutal selloff earlier this month. On April 9, Bloomberg reported that IGV had fallen 3.9% that day to its lowest close since November 2023 and was down more than 27% for 2026, while a software-as-a-service index had dropped almost 40% for the year. (bloomberg.com) Reuters reported on April 9 that the selling was tied to renewed fears that newer artificial intelligence tools could automate work now handled by traditional software products. Reuters said the broader S&P 500 Software and Services Index was down 25.5% for the year in that selloff. (money.usnews.com) IGV is a sector fund that tracks U.S.-traded software stocks plus some interactive media and entertainment names, so its surge shows money returning to the group as a whole. Yahoo Finance’s performance page lists the fund at about $10.38 billion in net assets. (finance.yahoo.com) The rebound also shifted leadership inside tech. Yahoo Finance said semiconductors led the first leg of the market’s recovery, but software took over in the week ended April 17. (finance.yahoo.com) For investors, the week did not produce a clean “software is back” signal across every big name. It produced a narrower message: after a deep 2026 drawdown, buyers rushed back into selected cloud and growth stocks faster than the sector’s biggest franchises fully recovered. (finance.yahoo.com)