Tech's K-shaped boom: stocks up, jobs down
Key takeaways
- Tech's K-shaped boom: stocks up, jobs down Jared Blikre Sat, May 9, 2026 at 12:07 AM GMT+7 2 min read ^GSPC Tech is dominating the stock market and shrinking inside the labor market.
- That classic K-shaped divide — usually used to describe the US consumer — showed up again Friday after the April jobs report.
- A chart from Kevin Gordon, head of macro research and strategy for the Schwab Center for Financial Research, captures the divide.
Tech's K-shaped boom: stocks up, jobs down Jared Blikre Sat, May 9, 2026 at 12:07 AM GMT+7 2 min read ^GSPC Tech is dominating the stock market and shrinking inside the labor market.
That classic K-shaped divide — usually used to describe the US consumer — showed up again Friday after the April jobs report. But this time, the divergence is inside tech itself: Wall Street is paying record premiums for the sector’s stocks while its workforce keeps losing ground.
A chart from Kevin Gordon, head of macro research and strategy for the Schwab Center for Financial Research, captures the divide. Tech stocks are trading at an all-time high relative to the S&P 500. (^GSPC) At the same time, tech jobs — using BLS information payrolls as a proxy — have fallen to an all-time low as a share of total US payrolls.