Tech sell-off widens as South Korea index plunges | Hacker News Reader

Tech sell-off widens as South Korea index plunges

ft.com

Isn't this just a response to the Friday drop which happened around 5 AM Saturday South Korea time, well after their Friday bell?

Yeah, Korea is on one of the earliest time zones among the major markets: UTC+9, the same time zone as Japan, and just behind Australia. So on Mondays we're one of the first to react to anything that happened over the weekend. This reaction tends to be rather violent. Not to mention the country is going through quite a political turmoil right now...

Is this one of those situations where it spiked rapidly and now it’s going back down slightly? Or is it a real drop?

> where it spiked rapidly and now it’s going back down slightly?

An 8% intraday drop is nothing to sneeze at. Though, for what it’s worth, e mini S&P 500 futures traded flat today [1].

[1] https://www.cmegroup.com/markets/equities/sp/e-mini-sandp500...

KOSPI isn't really a country index, it's more like a concentrated chip/HBM ETF in disguise. Samsung Electronics + SK Hynix alone are roughly 30-40% of the index by market cap, and both move on the same AI-capex thesis as Nvidia/TSMC. So it seems to be the same trade pulling back expressed through a country index that's levered to it.

If the figures look softer than expected, keep in mind that it's local lay-men buying in - while foreign career investors are selling out[1]. Broadcom's earnings call may have kicked it off: the CEO started off mistaking last year's figures, and had to start over with below projected numbers[2].

[1]: https://www.cnbc.com/2026/05/18/s-korea-market-volatility-ne... [2]: https://www.fool.com/earnings/call-transcripts/2026/06/03/br...

https://archive.ph/f0mzg

YTD Kospi is +173%, after the sell-off, compared to +10% for the Nasdaq. Not exactly... worrying territory there.

But yeah, I'm sorry this whole circular financing bubble with AI should crash. As someone who's in community with people outside tech, things are pretty fucking dire and a correction in asset prices would probably be better long term.

> people outside tech, things are pretty fucking dire

Isn’t the jobs recession particular to tech [1]? (Well, and agriculture.)

[1] https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t14.htm

It's pretty awful outside tech. I know a lot of people struggling to find work, and those that have jobs are struggling to keep up with their bills. Nobody's wages are keeping up with costs.

Where are you geographically? The data indicate this varies wildly, with the West Coast seeing pain and the rest of the country seeing stability or even tightness [1].

[1] https://www.bls.gov/charts/state-employment-and-unemployment...

That data is just unemployment. It doesn’t address real wages.

Out here in California, I see headlines like “inflation hits 3.8%”, which seems right until I realize they mean YoY and not monthly, seasonally adjusted.

I know the Trump administration fired a bunch of economists for putting out honest numbers in 2025, so I trust the anecdotes and consumer sentiment stories over official numbers anyway.

I’d love to see third party CPI and inflation numbers, preferably by zipcode or at least state.

> I see headlines like “inflation hits 3.8%”, which seems right until I realize they mean YoY and not monthly, seasonally adjusted

Seasonally adjusted, month over month annualized, inflation was 7.2% in April [1]. (3.8% YoY.) Until December, the California economy was doing well, with average weekly wages up 4.6% YoY [2].

But in 2026, “real average hourly earnings for all employees [nationwide] decreased 0.5 percent from March to April, seasonally adjusted” [3]. And as of March, we know California’s electricity prices have risen faster than national average, 15 to 20% versus 7.2% nationally [4], causing it to be one of the few states where retail consumption decreased.

Put together, we’d expect real earnings in California to have fallen faster than the national average. What you’re seeing is real and clearly present in the data and representative of a bad trend being compounded by regional headwinds.

[1] https://www.bls.gov/cpi/latest-numbers.htm

[2] https://www.bls.gov/charts/county-employment-and-wages/perce...

[3] https://www.bls.gov/news.release/realer.nr0.htm

[4] https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/update/end-use.php

Midwest USA. Friends and family across Illinois, Iowa, Nebraska, Colorado, and Ohio.

Gas and food prices have skyrocketed. Rent has gone up massively in formerly dirt-cheap cities like Omaha the last several years. Many people are severely underemployed and struggling to save, moving in with roommates or parents to get by. People that had stable working-middle class employment through the entire 2010s.

Memory shortage forecasted for at least half a decade, likely more. Why should it crash?

Lots of possible stories if you write "and then it crashed" on the last line of a sheet of paper and work backwards.

e.g.

1. US economy becomes lopsided towards AI as per Dutch disease 2. US exports become relatively expensive, imports become relatively cheap, collapsing employment opportunities in general outside making more data centres 3. Nobody in the US except hyperscalers can afford anything 4. Fixed output from people still making consumer RAM not anticipating this 5. Oversupply relative to demand 6. Market price of consumer RAM collapses to shift stock

Of course, the ease of writing backwards is also why, famously, 11 of the last 2 recessions have been predicted. Or whatever the exact quote was.

I wonder how the proposal for 24x5 trading would affect how international selloffs like this ripple through US markets.

Just look at e minis. They trade Sunday to Friday.

Remember: don't panic and hopefully you're not leveraged

There’s some early signs of the wheels starting to come off the bus of the “irrational exuberance” that’s been fueling the AI bubble.

Still early days but a lot of folks positioning to protect themselves from the blast radius which is what is driving market volatility.

Talk in many circles and back rooms with the ultra-wealthy has shifted rapidly from “how do I get in on this AI action” to “how do I protect myself from collateral damage when this thing blows up.”

This is a correction for ants and is nothing compared to what will happen when the AI bubble collapses.

Eh looks like it already recovered about half of the plunge? KOSPI fell from 8,048 to 7,477, but now it's back to 7,807.

Nice time to buy. Pick up all that juicy coin when it bounces back.

There's plenty of steam left in the AI boom yet.

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