#SK海力士财报不佳盘后下跌 Have chip stocks fallen out of the “opportunity” zone? Institutional voices pour cold water: AI trading is still crowded; the bargain-hunting moment hasn’t arrived

After global chip stocks suffered consecutive sharp declines, valuation pressure has indeed eased somewhat. But judging from fund positioning structure and fundamentals, the market has not yet formed a clear right-side signal. GAM Global equities head Paul Markham believes that AI-related trading in US and Korean tech stocks is still crowded. At present, it’s more suitable to keep core exposure and reduce overall position sizing, rather than quickly betting on a reversal right after a rapid selloff.

This round of adjustment involves two layers of pressure.

The first layer is de-crowding at the trading level. Over the past year, money has flooded toward HBM, memory, optical modules, and advanced computing power. Holdings have become highly homogeneous; once risk appetite declines, active funds trimming positions, stop-losses on leveraged products, and systematic trading can easily trigger continuous selling pressure. Summer trading volumes being light further amplifies price volatility. As a result, the short-term decline may not fully reflect deterioration in fundamentals—but it also suggests that position clearing may take longer than expected.

The second layer is that the valuation logic has changed. In the past, when the market saw capital expenditure rising, it would immediately mark up expectations for chip demand and earnings. Now, it has started to examine whether investment can translate into revenue, profits, and free cash flow. The product competitiveness and earnings trends of leading players such as SK Hynix remain steady, but “good fundamentals” do not necessarily mean the stock price will bottom out right away. In a high-expectations environment, achieving earnings targets only shows that valuation is not getting worse. Only sustained upside surprises can reopen room for gains.

The key validation ahead will come from earnings reports from tech giants such as Meta, Microsoft, and Amazon. The focus is not only on the scale of capital expenditures, but also on cloud business growth, AI revenue contribution, margins, and free cash flow. If the giants keep raising investment but cannot prove that the return on investment improves in sync, chip stocks may still face a second round of valuation compression.

Therefore, the current phase looks more like a transition from a “broad market rally trade” to a “profitability-based stock screening” period. The long-term industrial trend for AI has not ended, but the conditions for bargain hunting in the short term are still not sufficient.

The truly compelling time to add more is when all three conditions are met at the same time: leading companies showing volume contraction while stabilizing and stopping the slide; crowded positions clearly declining; and tech giants proving that AI investment can generate stable returns.