A memory-chip meltdown has hit South Korea’s stock market.
Korean shares plunged 5% today, triggering a circuit breaker. Around midday, the Korea Exchange stepped in with a temporary trading halt, restricting sell orders to prevent panic selling from snowballing into even greater volatility.
The sell-off was largely driven by profit-taking after a strong rally.
The recent slide in memory stocks isn’t just about chips—it’s a "perfect storm" of outside factors:
📉 Silver Crash: Silver's wild drop triggered massive margin calls. Traders are selling their "winners" (like Micron/SanDisk) just to cover their losses.
🪙 Crypto Drag: Bitcoin’s dip below $78k is pulling down high-growth tech. The algorithms see them as the same "risky" basket.
💰 Profit Taking: After a 2025 where memory prices jumped 170%+, investors are finally hitting the "sell" button to lock in gains before the market cools.
Bottom Line: The AI demand is still there, but the stocks are undergoing a violent "risk-off" reset.
Heavyweight memory stocks turned sharply weaker, with SK Hynix and Samsung Electronics sliding in tandem. Their decline dragged the KOSPI down by about 5% intraday, abruptly snapping a multi-day winning streak.
This tremor may not stay confined to Korea. Similar pressure could soon spill over to global memory and storage names such as $SanDisk Corp.(SNDK)$ , $Micron Technology(MU)$ , $Seagate Technology PLC(STX)$ , and $Western Digital(WDC)$ , as investors reassess valuations after a prolonged run-up.
In truth, wild swings have become almost routine for Korean equities over the past two years. The market once tumbled from its highs into technical bear territory amid emergency political measures, only to roar back later on the back of a memory-chip boom. Last year alone, stocks surged nearly 90%. For Korean retail investors, this kind of roller-coaster ride is no longer a shock—it’s almost business as usual.
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