The Q - Daily Edition - 24/06/2026
Chip-Wreck
"When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?"
— John Maynard Keynes
Yesterday, equity investors faced presumably a steep sell-off, as they faced a nearly one-and-a-half percent sell-off in the S&P 500 and a 2.2% drop in the Nasdaq.
But did they really?
As a matter of fact, more sectors in the S&P 500 were up (6) than down (5):
Similarly, more stocks were up (285) than down (217) and more stocks made a new 52-week high (20) than a new 52-week low (10) - see the latter statistic below:
Hence, let’s define yesterday’s market action less as a market sell-off than an AI margin call, which is also very well visualised in the S&P’s heatmap:
In any case, the initiator for the tech sell-off seems to have a couple of news items out of Korea, where for example the regulators issued a warning on leveraged ETFs. Nearly simultaneously, SK Hynix, a memory-chip maker said it was “shifting its focus to the general-purpose DRAM market”, which not only raised concerns about future profit margins for the company (DRAM is a low margin business), but also sent US memory-chip makers into a tailspin
—> Micron 13%, SanDisk 14%, Western Digital 8%, Seagate 5%, Roundhill Memory ETF 14%.
For the less high-frequency investors amongst us, our well-defined “lines in the sand” continue to rule our “action plan”:
The broader European equity market (SXXP) has been able to hold above support (previous resistance - dashed line), which can be considered a positive:
Nothing to report back from interest rate markets, but the coiling formation (dashed line) in the chart of the US 10-year treasury yield chart suggests that this may change in the coming days:
In FX markets we already have seen a break-out move, and whilst it is not the side we were “hoping” for, it is what it is … The EUR/USD broke below 1.1400 yesterday, absent a very quick recovery above again, the path is open to somewhere around the 1.10 handle:
Always remember Keynes (see above: QOTD)
Finally, the stronger US Dollar is also pushing Gold lower towards our initial price target around of $/oz 3,900:
Yesterday I posted the following chart on LinkedIn (click here),
with the promise to resolve it today. Well, here’s the updated version:
Now, what is important to remember is that this is about direction and not amplitude, but still … stay tuned!!
Everything in this document is for educational purposes only (FEPO)
Nothing in this document should be considered investment advice
Investing real money can be costly; don’t do stupid shit
Leave politics at the door—markets don’t care.
Past performance is hopefully no indication of future performance
The views expressed in this document may differ from the views published by NPB Neue Privat Bank AG