No one was spared...

——Today isn’t a simple “broad market sell-off.” It’s that—just as the “war trade” has started to ebb, AI trading suddenly lost its conviction, and two of the most crowded trades were liquidated at the same time.

A strange scene played out across global markets on Tuesday—everything was falling, “no one was spared”:

- The Korean KOSPI index once dropped as much as 10% intraday, SK hynix fell by more than 13%, and US stock index futures accelerated lower as well;

- Oil prices slid for the third consecutive trading day, and US crude touched $80;

- Gold gave back all the gains from Monday’s open, and Bitcoin also saw a sizable decline;

- The US Dollar Index edged lower—but we still can’t simply define it as a “global liquidity crisis,” because the US Dollar Index isn’t surging; it’s instead slipping slightly.

Markets with almost no green—today, it wasn’t that all assets fell for the same reason. Instead, three trades retreated at the same time, and the final picture became “everything is down.”

The first: Oil prices fell, continuing the unwinding of geopolitical risk premia, as Trump gave the market expectations that negotiations could resolve the problem. This part is the easiest to understand.

The second: High-leverage trades were unwound. The Korean KOSPI index plunged, triggering constraints on algorithmic trading, while both SK hynix and Samsung Electronics also fell sharply. Korea’s market had risen too much beforehand, and around SK hynix there had been a surge in leveraged ETFs and concentrated positions. When prices reversed, not all investors were calmly reassessing fundamentals—many funds were simply forced to cut exposure (crowded trading and leverage-structure liquidations).

The third: A retreat from AI, with the market resetting how it prices the entire AI hardware supply-chain. Tomorrow, SK hynix will release its earnings report, and the market already knows its profit this quarter will be very strong—so strong that revenue is even expected to rise more than 3x year over year, and operating profit growth is approaching 6x (these are almost already baked into the stock price). Many semiconductor stocks often start to fall precisely when profits are at their best. Today isn’t the case that every investor suddenly stopped believing in AI. A substantial portion of the capital isn’t actively changing its long-term view; it’s being forced to reduce positions. Leveraged products in individual Korean stocks had expanded rapidly earlier, amplifying market volatility. Still, the market’s overall mindset is gradually shifting from “worrying the valuation is too high” to “doubting the business closed loop behind AI capital expenditures.”