Semiconductors fell 15% in July. What happened in the same month?

TSMC profit +77%, raised full-year capital expenditure guidance.
Google’s capital expenditure raised to $180–190 billion, with Cloud backlog orders at $514 billion.
ASML raised guidance twice. Micron revenue year over year +345%, signed 16 multi-year agreements to lock in $22 billion.
SK Hynix’s chairman said customer capacity doubling is still not enough.
Intel’s earnings beat expectations across the board, was hit hard after hours, and then slapped everyone in the face with the earnings report.
Put these numbers side by side: profit is rising, capex is increasing, orders are being locked in, and customers are lining up—which of these data points is saying “the top is in”? None of them.
If the industry truly were topping, what would you see? Big Tech starting to cut Capex, cloud business growth slowing down, OEM vendors cutting orders, backlog orders beginning to shrink, and storage prices loosening.
These signals aren’t showing up now—none of them, not a single one—so the drop isn’t fundamentals; it’s sentiment.
A month ago everyone was shouting “the storage supercycle,” and now the same crowd is shouting “the cycle has topped.”
The fundamentals haven’t changed at all in those 30 days.
It rallied too much in the first half, positioning got too crowded, a catalyst triggered profit-taking, and then panic sentiment fed on itself.
This is how it always goes before each round of brutal selloffs—and it stays like this even after the plunge.
Micron fell 26.5% in July, but it’s still up 197% this year; SanDisk fell more, yet it’s still up 471% this year.
Forward PE has already been compressed to 5.7x. These numbers were like this before the selloff, and they’re still like this after.
What’s down is positioning and sentiment, not demand. If you separate these two, you won’t make decisions in panic that you’ll regret.