Traders work on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange on March 3, 2026.
Brendan McDiarmid | Reuters
Cloud and software stocks were a rare bright spot amid Thursday’s market decline.
of WisdomTree Cloud Computing Fund (WCLD) rose 2.7%, marking the best day since April 24, when exchange-traded funds rose 4.7%.
The main cloud stocks that rose on Thursday jumped 8.4%. Octa and Wix.comand its stock price rose about 7%. Mongo DB and in tap. sale pointan identity security technology provider for cloud companies, rose 6.5%. Z scaler It rose 1.5%. hubspot and paycom softwaretop holding amount WCLDrose 4.5% and 1.5%, respectively.
Okta’s rise came after the identity security provider reported fourth-quarter earnings Wednesday night that beat Wall Street expectations. The company, which has benefited from the rise in agent-based artificial intelligence tools and related security needs, did offer a weak outlook for the first quarter.
Thursday’s move puts Okta on track for its best day since April 9, when it rose 11.3%. Okta stock is down 9.8% since the beginning of the year, and remains depressed amid the software crash. Still, the company remains popular among analysts, some of whom believe it has more AI resilience than its peers. JPMorgan and UBS recently highlighted Okta and Zscaler as companies most likely to withstand AI-related threats and find value from rapidly evolving technologies.
“While we expect model companies to deploy more cybersecurity products, we believe it is unrealistic to expect them to devote resources to building out infrastructure controls such as endpoint agents, distributed security gateway networks (SASE), and identity authentication platforms,” UBS analyst Roger Boyd reiterated Okta’s Buy rating in a Feb. 23 note to clients.
WisdomTree Cloud Computing Fund performance over the past year.
Despite the day’s gains, cloud stocks remain under pressure heading into 2026. of WCLD The fund is down about 16.2% since the beginning of the year.
Shares of traditional cloud and software-as-a-service (SaaS) companies have fallen this year as concerns about artificial intelligence disrupting traditional software stocks have weighed on the group. The late February launch of Claude Code Security, a security tool built into Anthropic’s Claude Code AI tool on the web, weighed on stocks in the software and security space.
—CNBC’s Gina Francola contributed reporting.
