NEW YORK, January 1, 2026, 13:30 ET — Market closed
- U.S. stock markets are closed Thursday for New Year’s Day and reopen Friday.
- Cloud-focused ETFs SKYY and WCLD last traded about 1% lower, with Microsoft down about 0.8%.
U.S.-listed cloud computing stocks ended 2025 on a softer note, with big cloud names and cloud-focused funds slipping in the last session before Wall Street shut for the New Year’s Day holiday.
That matters now because cloud and enterprise software shares were central to the AI-led market run in 2025, leaving the group sensitive to shifts in risk appetite as 2026 begins.
The S&P 500 fell 0.74% on Dec. 31 and the Nasdaq dropped 0.76% as technology shares were among the day’s laggards, Reuters reported. The year still ended with the S&P 500 up 16.39% and the Nasdaq up 20.36%, and Morgan Stanley Investment Management said it expects market performance to broaden in 2026.
Microsoft was last down about 0.8%, while Amazon slipped about 0.7% and Alphabet eased about 0.3%.
Oracle fell about 1.2%, and cloud-software names Snowflake and Cloudflare were each down about 1.2% based on the latest available prices.
Cloud baskets also weakened, with the First Trust Cloud Computing ETF and the WisdomTree Cloud Computing Fund each down about 1% in their last session.
The late-December pullback looked like positioning rather than a single company catalyst. “It’s just a healthy rebalancing of allocations,” Mark Hackett, chief market strategist at Nationwide, told Reuters. Reuters
Before the next session on Friday, traders will watch whether normal volumes change the tone after holiday-thin trading amplified moves into year-end.
Economic releases arrive quickly. The Institute for Supply Management is due to publish its manufacturing PMI for December at 10 a.m. ET on Monday, Jan. 5, and the Labor Department’s monthly employment report is scheduled for Friday, Jan. 9, the Bureau of Labor Statistics said.
For cloud stocks, the next test is guidance and spending plans as earnings season approaches. Investors will focus on capital expenditure, or capex — the cash companies commit to data centers and equipment that underpins cloud capacity.
The Federal Reserve’s first policy meeting of the year is scheduled for Jan. 27-28, another checkpoint for rate expectations that often drive valuations for growth stocks such as cloud software.
Friday’s reopen will help set the tone for whether the late-2025 dip was routine profit-taking or the start of a longer pause in the cloud-and-AI trade.
