Are the ‘Mangos’ stocks already turning soft?

Published Sun, Jul 5, 2026 · 09:50 AM

IN THE 1950s, Italian industrialist Enrico Mattei was credited with coining what might have been the first stock market catchphrase when he described the energy giants of that era, including Standard Oil and Texaco, as the “Seven Sisters”.

For better or worse, he unleashed creatively frustrated stockbrokers and Wall Street analysts to devise their own nicknames for companies in vogue. There were:

• The “Nifty Fifty”, steady large-cap stocks of the 1960s and 1970s, such as Kodak;
• The “Four Horsemen” (Cisco, Dell, Intel and Microsoft) of the first dotcom boom;
• “Faang” stocks of the social media age, including Facebook, Amazon and Apple; and
• The “Magnificent Seven” – Nvidia, Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon, Meta and Tesla – companies that grew to dominate major market indices in the years after Covid-19.

Now, a fruit is dangling into the lexicon.

“Mangos” is shorthand for a six-company cluster said to be at the centre of the artificial intelligence wave: Meta, Anthropic, Nvidia, Google, OpenAI and SpaceX. Investors hope this new cohort will grow and drive the stock market higher.

The group is on everyone’s lips. That’s partly because SpaceX made history last month with the largest initial public offering, trading above US$2 trillion. Much of that valuation was thanks to enthusiasm from relatively small “retail” investors who put their faith in the company’s CEO, Elon Musk.

Over the past month, more than a dozen mutual funds have been formed to bet on or against the Mangos. Never mind that two of the six companies, Anthropic and OpenAI, aren’t even publicly traded yet.

It’s a bit unclear who first came up with the term. A Bank of America research analyst, Vivek Arya, has used it occasionally over the past two years, but to describe a different set of chip stocks, he confirmed through a representative. (Only the N for Nvidia is the same.)

The current iteration of the acronym was popularised more recently by a software engineer’s Jun 8 post on the social platform X. It was shared widely by venture capitalists and tech investors, and talked up on business television.

But are these stocks already proving to have a short shelf life?

Since that post, the AI hype machine has hit the skids. Amid worries of overinvestment in data centres, mounting debt and expensive computer processing, as well as general concern that competition will drive down the price of AI products, shares of Meta, Nvidia and Alphabet (Google’s parent) were all down last month.

SpaceX has fallen drastically from its highs.

For the Mangos to stay firm, the companies will need to demonstrate staying power. And there’s no guarantee that any of them, let alone all, will stick around and thrive.

“The data is clear,” said Derek Horstmeyer, a professor of finance at George Mason University. “Once something is a coined term, it’s already run its course.”

Just look at Mattei’s phrase. Though the oil market is bigger than ever, only one of his “Seven Sisters”, Royal Gulf Shell, still operates as an independent company with part of its original name. NYTIMES