Børsraset fortsetter i Asia

Following the brutal day on Wall Street yesterday, stock market turmoil continues across Asia today. Japan's Nikkei 225 index plunged 6 percent, reaching its largest daily decline since April 2025, according to Bloomberg. At the start of trading in South Korea, the Kospi index plunged more than 8.7 percent, prompting a half-hour trading halt.

By the end of the trading day, the index was down nearly 5 percent. "A correction is due, but we think it could be a slight overreaction to the outcome of the midterm election," says Jun Kwang-woo of the Institute for Global Economics in Seoul, speaking to Reuters. Tech giants Samsung and SK Hynix fell by 5.86 percent and more than 9 percent, respectively.

In Taiwan, TSMC suffered its largest single-day drop of nearly 10 percent, but has since recovered slightly and was down 4.69 percent on Friday morning. "This is so extreme that almost everything I have seen since the dotcom bubble," says Chris McGuire, a fund manager who began trading options in 1991 and now works for a Japanese fund.

The concentration of investors in the same stocks or sectors has created more uniform momentum than we have seen in a long time, McGuire adds. As of 6:30 a.m. Norwegian time, the worst day of the year on Wall Street so far: AI and technology companies were hit hardest, including Nvidia, AMD, Micron, Tesla, and SpaceX. Elon Musk lost around $7.4 billion in a single day.

The reason behind this lies in the Democratic Party's victory in the midterm election on Tuesday, creating uncertainty about continued data center construction and thus demand for AI chips.