Higher oil hardly affects tech, it does hurt retail stocks a bit. It helps energy stocks a lot. That's a net positive with the current S&P weightings. Energy is more important to this market than retail stocks. People forget that the vast majority of the money going into stocks is from the rich, or the upper middle class: those who can easily afford $4 gas and higher oil is meaningless financially to them. It doesn't affect their consumption patterns. If gas goes to $15, $20/gallon, yes, you will get consumption patterns being affected for the upper middle class, not the rich though. But that will only happen with oil at $400-$500 barrel. That will happen within several years, but not something to worry about at the current time. In fact, higher oil is the perfect foil for dumb bears who have no rigor in their analysis to say that the market should fall because oil is going up. Higher oil is the perfect wall of worry.
That quote reminds me of how the sub prime mess was going to be limited to just a few problems here and there and that it would not affect much, well fast foward months later and you can see that the sub prime mess has affected millions of people and has cost hundreds of billions of dollars. I remember Ben Stein saying NOT TO WORRY BECAUSE the sub prime loans made up less than 1% of all mortgage loans, wow, what a fool. High oil is going to affect hundreds of industries, including tech.