EWY
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Not a thesis break, just a speed bump
Wedbush’s Dan Ives basically told investors to take a breath: Tuesday’s selloff in AI, semiconductor, and memory-chip stocks looks more like a “gut check moment” than proof that demand is fading. His argument is simple enough—checks in Taiwan and South Korea still point to strong demand across the AI supply chain, so this isn’t some dramatic plot twist where the servers stop ordering memory overnight.
The chip party got a little too loud
The pain showed up where the AI trade has been hottest. South Korean memory names got whacked, with Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix both dropping more than 12% on Tuesday, while TSMC also slid as investors yanked money out of anything remotely AI-flavored. In the U.S., the spillover hit the iShares MSCI South Korea ETF and the leveraged KORU fund too, because when the chip trade sneezes, the whole risk basket usually catches a cold.
Micron is the stress test
Micron sits right in the middle of this story, which is why everyone’s staring at its earnings like it’s the season finale. Ives says memory demand is still outrunning supply, and that the latest pullback in chip names is more like a healthy reset after a monster run. If Micron’s numbers back that up, buyers may treat this dip like a sale rack; if not, the market could keep spiraling into “maybe we got a little carried away” territory.
Big picture
The message here isn’t that AI is dead—far from it. It’s that even the hottest trade in the market eventually needs to catch its breath, and this week’s volatility is the market reminding everyone that straight lines are for spreadsheets, not stocks.