Hedge funds sell AI stocks for five straight days, wiping out over $1T

Goldman Sachs Prime Brokerage data showed that hedge funds sold global AI stocks on a net basis for five consecutive trading days from October 8 to 14, 2026, erasing all of their cumulative net purchases since the start of 2025 within a single week. Over the same period, the world's 20 most valuable AI and semiconductor companies together shed more than $1 trillion in market capitalization. The figures were cited in reports published on October 18 by East Money and 36Kr, which described the dates and numbers in the same terms.

The selling spread beyond AI stocks into broader markets. South Korea's stock market entered bear-market territory, and the Seoul exchange triggered a circuit breaker. The reports also noted that hedge fund leverage overall remained high, and that whether the concentrated unwinding of AI trades could set off a new round of deleveraging was a focus of market attention.

On October 16, AI-related technology stocks in the US came under renewed selling. The Nasdaq 100 fell 2% in a single session and ended the week down 5.5%, which the reports described as the index's largest weekly decline since April 2025. Chip stocks closed lower for an eighth straight session, the longest losing streak since 2008. The storage sector index fell 6.28% that day, with SK Hynix ADR down more than 6.5%, SanDisk down more than 6.8%, Micron Technology down more than 5.6%, and optical communications company Coherent down more than 7%. The same report noted that the 10-year US Treasury yield reversed a three-day decline, the dollar index hit a more than two-week low, and the offshore renminbi touched a new four-year high during the session. The publicly reported sequence ends with the October 16 selloff and the weekly close; the materials do not say whether further deleveraging followed.