Emigration figures suggest many Americans no longer view the US as the best place to live. Judging by YTD returns, the US may not be the best place to invest either.

On Friday, the MSCI Asia Pacific Index motored towards a sixth straight gain and a seventh in nine on the way to outperforming US shares for a third month.

When you drop the most widely-tracked gauge of AsiaPac shares into Excel, the superlatives just pile up. February was the third monthly gain in a row and the 10th in 11, for example.

There’s the chart. Since the “Liberation Day” lows, the index is up 60% versus 39% for the S&P and 46% for the Nasdaq 100.

It’s not “sell America,” exactly. But the suggestion — as parroted incessantly by Scott Bessent — that somehow US assets have outperformed since the worst of last year’s tariff drama is misleading where it’s not completely false.

As the subtitle on the chart above notes, this was the best February for the AsiaPac gauge on record.

The chart above gives you some context for what, despite being useless trivia, is worth a mention all the same: This was the best February for Asian shares collectively since at least the late 1990s, when the benchmark was inaugurated.

More trivia: At the time of that benchmark’s inception, Celine Dion was still shrieking that her “heart would go on” from the top of the Billboard 200, and today’s middle-aged housewives were 14-year-olds sobbing up at theater screens where Leonardo DiCaprio was drowning in the frigid wreckage of the Titanic.

Coming quickly back to 2026, the real standout in Asia’s obviously the KOSPI. The figure below’s astounding.

Despite slipping on Friday, South Korean shares are up 47% for 2026 and — drumroll — 166% from the “Liberation Day” nadir.

“[These] eye-popping figure[s] might suggest fevered speculation is at play,” Bloomberg mused. Cue Neal Page: “Do you think so?”

Of course, that doesn’t mean they can’t keep going higher. But the near vertical inflection over the last three weeks — the KOSPI’s up 25% since February 9 — feels unstable, particularly given the vol backdrop.

As the figure above shows, Seoul’s in thrall to a raging “spot up / vol up” regime.

Again, that’s not sustainable. When you see a rally with as much momentum as South Korean shares currently have, and vol’s not only elevated but in this case has only been higher in recent years during the onset of an outright global crisis, it’s time to tread cautiously.

In his latest, BofA’s Michael Hartnett jokingly called the KOSPI rally “K-pop.” If it’s a bubble, that joke’s even funnier.