As the gusts die down, the “SaaS-pocalypse” has been downgraded to a mere “Severe SaaS Weather Event.”

That’s the thinking of Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon at least, who said at a UBS conference in Key Biscayne, Florida on Tuesday that the end-times narrative over the past few weeks, as experienced in a massive software as a service stock selloff, has been “a little too broad.” It’s an optimistic opinion increasingly shared by Wall Street’s collective inner stock-picker.

Agents of Change

There’s a reason the arrival of Anthropic’s Claude coding tools blew a roughly $800 billion hole in the software market. If you start hyperventilating enough, then being any type of SaaS company in the age of coding AI appeared all too similar to those companies that specialized in digital cameras or GPS devices or MP3 players or, say, alarm clocks right when the iPhone arrived in 2007. But SaaS firms are not lumbering dinosaurs, oblivious and defenseless to the oncoming asteroid. Not all of them, at least. “There’ll be winners and losers — plenty of companies will pivot and do just fine,” Solomon said Tuesday.

In a research note published this week, analysts at JPMorgan outlined just exactly who they see as potential winners as the balance of risk in the market grows “increasingly skewed towards a rebound”:

• In a list of 19 “AI-Resilient Software Companies,” the JPMorgan analysts highlighted cybersecurity as one “higher quality” software segment, naming firms such as CrowdStrike, Palo Alto Networks, SentinelOne and Zscaler. Data software and enterprise firms such as Snowflake, Twilio and Okta also got a call out.
• “Enterprise software remains deeply embedded across the corporate landscape, underpinned by multi-year contracts and high switching costs that provide a significant buffer against near-term displacement,” the analysts wrote.

That echoes a Wedbush Securities note last week that similarly said enterprise companies are unlikely to unwind decades and billions of dollars worth of software infrastructure to pivot to AI-made tools, claiming the “Armageddon scenario for the [SaaS] sector that is far from reality.” Katy Huberty, Morgan Stanley’s global director of research, similarly posited this week that the recent sell-off has been “sentiment-driven, not fundamental.”

One Sector After Another: And yet, the rout continues unabated, with seemingly a new AI tool appearing every day to launch a specific sector into an existential crisis. Look no further than the financial services industry, which tanked on Tuesday after the arrival of Hazel, a new AI-powered tax planning tool from wealth management platform Altruist. In its wake, shares of Charles Schwab fell more than 7%, while shares of LPL Financial and Raymond James fell more than 8% each on Tuesday.

It’s not the destination, it’s the journey — and in this economy, Americans are taking very different ones.

Marriott’s fourth-quarter earnings report shows that well-heeled travelers are still shelling out for top-tier accommodations while budget and middle-income travelers are pulling back. A key industry metric, revenue per available room, jumped more than 6% for global luxury hotels in the fourth quarter. The hotel giant’s overseas travel business also helped boost the company’s results, with 6.1% growth for revenue per available room in international markets compared to a 0.1% decline in the US and Canada.

That slowdown close to home reflected the impact of the government shutdown late last year, especially on business travellers, Marriott CEO Anthony Capuano said via the company’s news release. And a deep divide for American consumers.

“The K-shaped economy is certainly impacting the travel vertical,” Capuano told CNBC.

Puttin’ on the Ritz

Despite missing Wall Street’s expectations, Marriott’s stock gained 9% on Tuesday thanks to a 2026 outlook that included revenue per available room growing between 1.5% and 2.5%. Investors also loved the company’s expectation for its co-branded credit card fees to jump 35%.

And Marriott expects big spenders to keep spending big, which is especially good news for a company with about 10% of its global inventory and 10% of its global pipeline in the luxury tier:

• “When you look internationally, there is an almost insatiable demand for luxury,” Capuano said on a post-earnings call.
• Leeny Oberg, Marriott’s chief financial officer, indicated that she expects luxury travel to continue to be so strong, it could offset the slowdown in business travel seen since the pandemic.

Comeback for Corporate? Putting employees on planes for in-person meetings may have taken a backseat for many companies in recent years, but that could soon make a turnaround. A survey from Morgan Stanley published at the end of December showed that 61% of respondents said they are “very optimistic” or “somewhat optimistic” about the 2026 outlook for business travel, up from 50% in a 2025 mid-year survey. “Hotel bookings are predicted to increase 6.3%, with room rates up 3.9%, while the impact of virtual meetings on travel continues to shrink,” according to Morgan Stanley.

As a Big Three ratings agency, S&P Global is usually the one handing out grades on Wall Street.

After the company reported its fourth quarter and full year earnings on Tuesday, markets got their turn to render a verdict. Unfortunately, the financial information and analytics provider’s revenue proved unable to overcome a wave of AI-driven investor jitters, meaning yesterday’s grade came back like one handed down by a high school’s grumpy AP chemistry teacher.

Software’s Softening Up

In the four trading days before Tuesday, S&P Global mostly sidestepped the Great Software Panic, its shares falling a mere 3.8% in all. That changed when the company reported. Revenue increased 9% year-over-year in the fourth quarter to $3.9 billion, in line with Wall Street estimates. Of note, the indices business, which maintains the blue chip S&P 500 and Dow Jones Industrial Average, saw revenue climb 14%.

But that couldn’t overcome the current AI-induced freakout moment. S&P Global’s forecast for 2026 didn’t help either, as executives expect revenue growth to slow to between 6.6% and 8.6%, down from 9% last year. All told, the company’s shares tanked 9.7% on Tuesday:

• “The AI anxiety will likely linger,” said analysts at ClearStreet before the earnings announcement, suggesting firms will simply have to deal with the market’s fretting du jour. Meanwhile, even as revenue at S&P’s ratings division rose 8% in the quarter, the selloff reverberated at rival ratings agency Moody’s, whose shares lost 6.8%.
• Analysts at JPMorgan flagged the selloff as an overreaction, writing it’s “unclear whether AI will ultimately depend on software infrastructure or replace it, but current market pricing is expressing the most bearish possible outcome, which we view as an overshoot at this time.”

Buyback Their Affection: S&P Global shares are now down over 23% this year, but there are signs of value. CEO Martina Cheung noted S&P rewarded shareholders with a whopping $6.2 billion in 2025, $1.2 billion in the form of dividends and $5 billion in share buybacks, which is equal to more than 100% of the company’s adjusted free cash flow. Tuesday’s earnings report said S&P Global intends to return roughly 85% of free cash flow to investors this year. The current share price of $444 also significantly trails the average analyst target price of $615, implying a roughly 38% upside, with most rating it a buy.