What Happened?
A number of stocks jumped in the afternoon session after the 10-year Treasury yield dropped below 4.5%, providing valuation relief amid a broader tech pullback.
While semiconductor stocks like Micron (-2%) and Cerebras (-10%) dragged the Nasdaq lower, software names like Salesforce and ServiceNow found relative support from falling yields. The 10-year Treasury yield fell below 4.5% as oil prices slid, signaling easing inflation pressures.
Software companies, particularly high-growth SaaS names, are highly sensitive to interest rates because their valuations are based on cash flows expected far in the future. When the 10-year yield drops, the discount rate applied to those future earnings decreases, mechanically boosting their present value. While the broader tech sector is undergoing a "recalibration of expectations" following the semiconductor run-up, falling yields validate the structural valuation floor for software stocks with recurring revenue models.
The stock market overreacts to news, and big price drops can present good opportunities to buy high-quality stocks.
Among others, the following stocks were impacted:
- Marketing Software company Sprout Social (NASDAQ: SPT) jumped 3.3%. Is now the time to buy Sprout Social? Access our full analysis report here, it’s free.
- Tax Software company Intuit (NASDAQ: INTU) jumped 3.3%. Is now the time to buy Intuit? Access our full analysis report here, it’s free.
- Cloud Monitoring company PagerDuty (NYSE: PD) jumped 3.7%. Is now the time to buy PagerDuty? Access our full analysis report here, it’s free.
Zooming In On PagerDuty (PD)
PagerDuty’s shares are very volatile and have had 28 moves greater than 5% over the last year. In that context, today’s move indicates the market considers this news meaningful but not something that would fundamentally change its perception of the business.
The previous big move we wrote about was 2 days ago when the stock dropped 3% after a confluence of high-profile AI talent departures from Alphabet, and a regulatory overhang pulled the entire communication-services and software complex lower.
Alphabet fell roughly 6%. Microsoft slipped as well. When the two largest software-adjacent megacaps decline together, the sector indices follow mechanically given their index weight. But the deeper driver was the market's persistent fear that AI agents would erode the subscription model that underpins traditional enterprise software economics. That fear had been compounding all year. Salesforce trades around $152, down roughly 43% year-to-date and near its 52-week low. Adobe fell approximately 49% over the past year and has not traded this cheap on earnings in over a decade.
The previous week's Accenture collapse, a near-20% single-day drop after the consulting giant cut its growth outlook and explicitly cited AI compressing demand for traditional IT services acted as a fresh confirmation of the thesis. If the largest IT services firm in the world is signaling that AI is eating its billable hours, investors extend the same logic to the software vendors whose products those hours configure.
The counterargument is that the selling has become indiscriminate. Salesforce is a Rule-of-40 company retiring 10% of its shares through a $25 billion buyback, carrying the largest AI revenue line in the category, and it is acquiring usage-based billing platforms like m3ter precisely to monetize AI agent actions rather than seats. Monness upgraded the stock to Buy the previous week on valuation. The market is pricing the cannibalization as if it already happened; the income statements might be indicating otherwise. But until these companies can prove that AI revenue scales faster than it erodes the legacy subscription base, software might remain in the penalty box even on days when the rest of tech (especially chip stocks) is celebrating.
PagerDuty is down 28.8% since the beginning of the year, and at $8.82 per share, it is trading 48.6% below its 52-week high of $17.17 from September 2025. Investors who bought $1,000 worth of PagerDuty’s shares 5 years ago would now be looking at only $196.76.
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