Is Apple Still a Tech Stock? AAPL's Correlation With 6,809 US Stocks
This week a widely shared chart showed Apple's 3-month correlation with the Nasdaq 100 slipping below zero for the first time on record. It reads like a sudden break. A longer look suggests Apple has been drifting away from the average stock for years.
Correlworks lines up AAPL against every other US-listed stock (NASDAQ, NYSE, NYSE American) and measures the Pearson correlation of their daily closing prices over about five years. Here is what that distribution shows.
The headline numbers
Across 6,809 pairwise correlations:
- 40.3% are positive and 59.7% are negative.
- The average correlation is −0.076.
- 14.6% are strongly positive (≥ 0.7) and 8.8% are strongly negative (≤ −0.7).
So in the 2020–2025 window, more stocks moved against Apple's price path than with it. Apple has a sizeable cluster of strong co-movers, but it is not a stand-in for "the market".
How Apple compares with the other megacaps
| Ticker | Positive pairs | Mean | Strong + (≥0.7) | Strong − (≤−0.7) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| TSLA | 68.2% | +0.149 | 1.1% | 0.0% |
| AMZN | 63.2% | +0.133 | 7.5% | 2.4% |
| GOOGL | 48.2% | +0.045 | 14.2% | 2.9% |
| MSFT | 41.4% | −0.052 | 14.9% | 7.0% |
| AAPL | 40.3% | −0.076 | 14.6% | 8.8% |
| NVDA | 38.7% | −0.072 | 16.0% | 7.7% |
| META | 35.1% | −0.179 | 15.6% | 24.6% |
(META is measured against 6,746 stocks; the others against 6,809.)
Three things stand out:
- The "Magnificent 7" are not one trade. Tesla and Amazon line up with most of the market; Meta, Nvidia and Apple line up with less than 41% of it.
- Apple sits with Microsoft and Nvidia, not with Amazon. Its profile is closest to MSFT (40.3% vs 41.4% positive) and NVDA (38.7%).
- Apple has a fat negative tail. 8.8% of its pairs are strongly negative, second only to Meta's 24.6% in this group.
Apple vs its own sector
Correlworks puts AAPL in the SIC sector Electronic Computers. Its two best-known sector peers look similar:
| Ticker | Positive pairs | Mean |
|---|---|---|
| DELL | 41.2% | −0.039 |
| AAPL | 40.3% | −0.076 |
| SMCI | 35.8% | −0.119 |
What this does and doesn't tell you
- These are correlations of price levels, not daily returns, over a fixed five-year window. Price-level correlation mostly captures whether two stocks trended in the same direction over that period. It is a different measure from the 3-month return correlation in this week's chart, so treat this as long-run context, not confirmation.
- The data ends June 2025. A refresh is in progress.
- Correlation is not causation and not a trading signal.
Explore it yourself
The free AAPL correlation page shows the full histogram. You can compare any of ~6,800 US-listed stocks the same way, no sign-up needed. Method details are on the methodology page.