The Nasdaq fell six days straight, then chips ripped. Microsoft, Samsung, and Citadel buying out Aschenbrenner all landed inside 18 hours.
The Nasdaq's six-day losing streak ended at exactly six, which our own history piece said was the single most likely outcome. Microsoft's $678 billion backlog, Samsung's call that the chip crunch runs to 2028, and Citadel buying the bulk of a leveraged $24 billion book all arrived between Wednesday's close and Thursday afternoon.
Korea's small investors absorbed the whole crash. On Thursday they gave up and sold 1.43 trillion won.
For two weeks Korea's individual investors bought whatever foreign funds sold. On July 30 the roles reversed. Foreigners came back for the first time in five sessions, retail sold 1.43 trillion won into them, and forced liquidations at brokerages rose 340% in a single day.
Samsung posted its best quarter ever. Seoul was up 5.54% on it, then gave the whole thing back.
Samsung's stock fell 5.23 percent on July 29, a day before its own confirmed earnings even came out. When the record numbers landed Thursday, the Kospi rose as much as 5.54 percent, then gave all of it back and closed lower.
Microsoft (MSFT) grew Azure 43% with $678 billion already booked. That is what Nvidia (NVDA) and Micron (MU) needed to hear.
Microsoft held its capital spending outlook near $190 billion, grew Azure 43% and rose 7.6% after hours. Meta raised its capex range by $10 billion at the low end, missed on earnings at $6.18 against a $7.14 estimate, and fell 9.0%. The market stopped scoring hyperscalers on capex announcements and started scoring them on whether the revenue arrives. That is a better setup for Nvidia, Broadcom and Taiwan Semiconductor than another spending headline, though it does nothing about the memory supply problem that actually caused July.
The Fed held rates 9 to 3. Warsh says the AI capex boom is driving up chip prices.
The Fed held the federal funds target range at 3.5% to 3.75% on July 29 in a 9 to 3 vote, with Beth Hammack, Neel Kashkari and Lorie Logan dissenting in favor of a quarter-point increase. Chairman Kevin Warsh listed the AI capex boom as one of four questions the committee debated and said it is driving up prices of memory and logic chips. The June minutes show many participants expect AI infrastructure demand to keep pressuring technology and electricity prices.
Korean investors sent funeral wreaths to the National Assembly. Forced selling is up 596% this year (July 29, 2026)
An investor group had about 30 funeral wreaths delivered to Korea's National Assembly on July 29, carrying messages asking whether investor protection is only words. Forced liquidations at Korea's 10 largest brokerages rose 596% from January to June, and the fastest increase of all was among investors 70 and older.
SK Hynix (SKHY) missed consensus by 5.5%. I sat through the call and I'm still holding
I was signed into the SK Hynix earnings call last night, watching SKHY drop and trying to figure out why. The company came in 5.5% under estimates on the best quarter it has ever had, but the margin held at 76% and the shortfall was HBM4 shipments sliding into the second half. Seoul took the stock down 19.6% intraday. I own SKHY at $154 and I'm not selling this one.
Seoul halted its stock market two days in a row. The rules written to stop it start Friday (July 29, 2026)
The Kospi closed Wednesday at 5,663.24, down 5.98%, after trading 12.63% lower at its worst point, and both Korean markets halted for a second straight day, which has never happened before. Deputy Prime Minister Koo Yun-chul apologized for the single stock leveraged ETFs blamed for the size of the move, then called the four financial chiefs in at 6 p.m. The cash deposit rule meant to cool those funds does not take effect until Friday.
SK Hynix (SKHY) reported a record quarter and still missed. One analyst broke from the pack and called it within a quarter of a percent
SK Hynix reported 60.5426 trillion won ($41.6 billion USD) of operating profit against a 64.09 trillion won consensus, 5.5% short, on revenue 5.6% short. Both figures are records. The operating margin came in at 76%, right where the street had it, so the entire miss was revenue rather than profitability. Korea Investment & Securities was the only firm below the pack and landed within a quarter of a percent.
Citadel says the Fed hikes Wednesday. All 104 economists Reuters asked say it won't (MU, NVDA, July 28, 2026)
I was sure Citadel's rate call knocked the Nasdaq down 2% Tuesday morning. Nvidia (NVDA) was green while Micron (MU) fell 7.69% and the 2-year yield never moved, so it was not the Fed at all. It was Seoul. Here is the split that actually matters at 2 p.m. Wednesday.
Korea's Kospi fell 10.84% and halted trading. Nvidia (NVDA) is flat and Micron (MU) is down 10% (July 28, 2026)
Korea's Kospi closed at 6,023.66 on Tuesday, down 10.84%, its fourth largest one-day fall on record, after Korea Exchange stopped all trading for 20 minutes. Samsung and SK Hynix each lost more than 13%. The US carryover went into memory and storage, with Sandisk (SNDK) down 14.52% and Micron (MU) down 9.54%, while Nvidia (NVDA) held flat and the Dow rose.
Nasdaq futures were up over 1% and things looked good. Then chips tanked and took the whole gain with them, led by ASML, Micron (MU) and Nvidia (NVDA) (July 27, 2026)
Futures pointed to a strong open on the Iran ceasefire and a 6.79% drop in oil. QQQ opened up 1.09% and was negative within the hour. Three chip headlines did it, and two of them came out of China: a domestic DUV lithography report that hit ASML, and CXMT's Shanghai debut that hit Micron.
ChangXin Memory (CXMT) closed up 466% on day one and is worth as much as Intel. Its factories are sold out through 2027.
ChangXin Memory (CXMT) closed its Shanghai debut up 465.82%, passing ICBC as China's most valuable listed company and drawing level with Intel. Only 6.73% of its stock was tradable. The order book behind it is the part that matters for Micron (MU) and SK Hynix (SKHY).
Korea signed $950 billion in AI deals, then foreign investors sold 2.9 trillion won of SK Hynix and Samsung (July 27, 2026)
Monday was the first Seoul session after Korean companies signed about $950 billion of AI agreements in San Francisco. Kospi opened 1.7% higher, then fell almost 2% when China's CXMT closed its Shanghai debut up 465.82%. Foreign investors sold a net 2.9039 trillion won of Kospi stocks, and the two they sold most were SK Hynix and Samsung Electronics.
SK Hynix (SKHY) reports earnings Wednesday. Even the lowest forecast beats what it earned in all of 2025.
Everyone who follows SK Hynix agrees the April to June quarter was the best in company history. They disagree by about 16% on how good. The lowest forecast on the board still has the company making more money in three months than it made in all of 2025.
US strikes on Iran paused. Oil fell more than 3%, and Micron (MU) and Nebius (NBIS) rose over the weekend
US Central Command has gone two straight nights without striking Iran, and a Defense Department source told CNN operations are on a hold. Polymarket puts an effective ceasefire at 75% by August 31. US markets were shut all weekend, but the tokenized stock market never closed, and it spent Sunday buying the AI trade and selling oil.
If I had $1,000 for one AI chip stock, I'd buy SK Hynix (SKHY) over Nvidia (NVDA), Micron (MU) and AMD
Nvidia and SK Group signed a $500 billion AI infrastructure deal late Friday night, after both New York and Seoul had closed for the week. Given $1,000 for one of the four AI chip stocks, I'd put it in SK Hynix, which trades at 5.6 times forward earnings even after its 28% ADR premium against 6.4 for Micron.
Samsung just signed a $200 billion deal with Broadcom (AVGO), a 32-year TSMC (TSM) customer.
Samsung Electronics signed a memorandum with Broadcom on July 24 covering more than $200 billion of work over five years, through 2030. Broadcom has had TSMC make its chips since 1994, and about 95% of the wafers it outsourced last year came from there. Samsung's foundry holds 6.5% of the world market against TSMC's 72%, and Seoul had closed for the week before any of it was announced.
The busiest stock on Hyperliquid isn't Nvidia. It's SK Hynix (SKHY), and it out-traded Ethereum
Real world assets did $25.1 billion on Hyperliquid in the week of July 13 to 19, out-trading crypto on the venue for the first time. The busiest contract is not Nvidia or Tesla. It is SK Hynix, which passed Ethereum for second place on the whole exchange, and whose Nasdaq listing (SKHY) fell 8.8% on Friday.
SK Hynix (SKHY) sells the memory in Nvidia's (NVDA) Rubin racks. SK Group is committing $1.44T USD to the chips and data centers around them.
Nvidia and SK Hynix signed a multiyear memory partnership with no dollar figure attached. SK Group then committed 2,100 trillion won ($1.44T USD) to chip capacity and 15 gigawatts of AI data centers, built on Nvidia's Vera Rubin reference design. Nvidia put $1 billion into Naver on July 24. Here is what each side actually committed, and what is funded versus announced.
Elon Musk thanked Micron (MU) by name on Tesla's earnings call this week. That's what a real memory shortage looks like.
Musk thanked Micron on Tesla's earnings call, Intel's CEO called memory its biggest supply constraint the next day, SK Hynix's CEO sees a shortage into the next decade, and CXMT is about to IPO into all of it.
SK Hynix (SKHY) reports July 29, and it will most likely be the best quarter the company has ever had
SK Hynix (SKHY) reports second quarter earnings on July 29, and analysts think it will most likely be the best quarter in company history. Profit is expected to be almost six times what it was a year ago, with a profit margin that would be a new record. The demand is coming from artificial intelligence, and it now reaches more than just one kind of chip.
SK Hynix (SKHY) denies it is buying Intel's (INTC) Ohio chip campus, hours after the report lifted its stock
SK Hynix was reported to be in talks to buy Intel's unfinished Ohio chip campus. Hours later, SK Hynix formally denied the report in a Korea Exchange filing.
Micron (MU), SK Hynix and AMD just gave chip stocks their first back-to-back gain in two weeks (July 21, 2026)
Micron (MU) closed up about 12 percent, SK Hynix's ADR about 14 percent, and AMD 8 percent Tuesday, chip stocks' first back-to-back gain in two weeks. A Bank of America upgrade on memory demand and a new AMD-Microsoft Azure deal did the heavy lifting.