I suppose I’d be remiss not to mention a watershed moment from the wild, wild world of South Korea’s semi-fueled equity bubble.
On June 22, 2026, SK Hynix leapfrogged Samsung to become the country’s most valuable publicly-traded company.
The English language, rich as it is in superlatives, is wholly insufficient when it comes to communicating just how remarkable the SK Hynix story really is. Maybe Korean’s better in that regard. I don’t speak it, so I wouldn’t know.
It’s not just the absurd scope of the recent rally. As Reuters reminded market participants on Monday, this is a company that was more or less bankrupt and that traded for pennies in 2002 and 2003. After rising nearly 6% to start the week, SK Hynix was worth $1.35 trillion, or roughly infinity-gazillion won.
The stock’s up eight days in a row, 11 weeks in 12 and seven months in eight. Among the monthly gains, SK Hynix counts a 40% advance, a 60% advance and, in May, an 81% surge.
This is what happens when you have a quasi-monopoly on a key component at the dawn of a tech epoch. SK Hynix is to high-bandwidth memory what Nvidia is to AI accelerators.
Speaking of accelerators, it’s not just the company’s dominance in HBM that’s driving the stock. There’s a role for (blame to be placed with) South Korean regulators’ decision to green-light leveraged single-stock ETFs.
“How about the SK Hynix options open interest,” Nomura’s Charlie McElligott exclaimed, flagging huge demand for upside.
The Bloomie screengrab, above, gives you a sense of that demand.
The call-buying “obviously speaks to speculative fervor in the memory space, but also I think reflect[s] leveraged ETFs increasingly needing to participate in options for leverage, as their traditional financing lines max out,” McElligott went on.
On Monday, South Korea’s top financial regulator said that in retrospect, he should’ve done everything in his power to stop the launch of leveraged products tied to single stocks.
“I have a lot of regrets,” Lee Chan-jin told reporters. “Reflecting on the situation, I wonder if I should’ve laid down to protest the launch and blocked it by any means necessary.”
