Haelangdal
Founder Analyst
AI infra · macro · mega-theme research
Recent Reports
- Research·Aug 29, 2026·16 min
Weekly Market Review: Week 35 (August Week 4)
Week 35 (8/24-8/28) was the week KOSPI returned to its starting point and then gave it back on the final session. After the close on the previous Friday, Samsung Electronics' board had approved a 2026 shareholder-return program of 90 to 110 trillion won. On the next trading day, August 24, the stock closed at 257,000 won, down 8.70%. The size fell short of the upper bound the market had been carrying, and the share of the program allocated to cancellation had not been fixed. KOSPI closed at 6,696.96, down 215.99 points, a decline of 3.12%. On August 25 the index fell as much as 4.30% to 6,408.82 intraday before individual and institutional buying turned it to a 0.68% gain, and it rose 0.97% on the 26th and 1.53% on the 27th. The August 27 close of 6,912.37 sits 0.58 points from the prior Friday's 6,912.95. SK Hynix closed August 27 at 1,730,000 won, the same value as on August 21. On the same day the Bank of Korea raised its base rate from 2.75% to 3.00%, a second consecutive hike and the first back-to-back move in three years and seven months. After the US close on August 26, Nvidia reported fiscal 2027 second-quarter revenue of 96.2 billion dollars, and the stock rose 8.74% the next day. On August 28, however, foreign investors sold a net 1.7564 trillion won ahead of Chair Kevin Warsh's Jackson Hole speech, and KOSPI closed at 6,788.88, down 123.49 points. For the week KOSPI fell 1.79% while the S&P 500 rose 0.49% and the Nasdaq 0.85%.
- Company·Aug 26, 2026·22 min
NVIDIA — Preview of the August 2026 Earnings Release
NVIDIA has beaten the earnings estimate in each of the last ten quarters, yet six of the eight reports since August 2024 were followed by a lower close the next session. Over the same period combined quarterly free cash flow at the four hyperscalers fell from 61.7 billion dollars to 6.7 billion, a decline of 89 percent, and in the first quarter of 2026 NVIDIA's own free cash flow exceeded that of all four customers combined. The 500 billion dollar compute financing platform announced on August 10 is a response to customers no longer being able to fund equipment from their own cash, and it gives NVIDIA an option to guarantee up to 25 percent of each deal. A confirmed residual value guarantee of 105 billion dollars equals 53.7 percent of shareholders' equity. The credit market has not priced that transfer: NVIDIA trades at 20.2 basis points, near the bottom of its own range, while the hyperscaler index sits at 185.8 basis points and the 97.1st percentile. Inventory has grown faster than revenue for five straight quarters, and the top three customers moved from 30 percent of revenue to 54 percent in a year.
- Research·Aug 22, 2026·16 min
Weekly Market Review: Week 34 (August Week 3)
Week 34 (8/17-8/21) gave Korea only four trading sessions. Monday August 17 was a substitute public holiday for Liberation Day, so the Korea Exchange was closed and only the US traded. What set the week's direction was long-dated sovereign yields. On August 18 the US 30-year yield rose to its highest level in about two decades, and a US semiconductor index fell nearly 5% in a single session. The shock carried into Seoul the next day. On August 19 KOSPI closed at 6,471.17, down 398.66 points or 5.80%, after touching 6,400.81 intraday, and a sell-side sidecar was triggered at 9:06 a.m. Foreign investors sold a net 3.5035 trillion won and institutions 1.3244 trillion won, while individuals absorbed 4.6367 trillion won. The rebound came from board resolutions. Yields did not come down. Once it was confirmed that SK Hynix had resolved to buy back and fully cancel 40.0434 trillion won of its own shares, KOSPI rose 5.89% on August 20 and SK Hynix gained 12.73% in a single session. After the close on August 21, Samsung Electronics' board approved a 2026 shareholder-return program of 90 to 110 trillion won. The same day KOSDAQ fell 4.63% and its own sell-side sidecar was triggered at 10:05 a.m. For the week KOSPI fell 0.93%, while KOSDAQ went from 834.20 on August 18 to 801.94 on August 21. The S&P 500 fell 1.43% and the Nasdaq 2.05%. Over the same stretch bitcoin rose 24.67%, from 62,835 dollars at the August 14 close to 78,335 dollars on August 21. The yield spike worked in opposite directions on AI-linked equities and on bitcoin.
- Research·Aug 21, 2026·35 min
Testing What Drove the Bitcoin and Ethereum Surge — Volume, ETFs, Stablecoins
Of the three explanations offered for bitcoin's 20.3 percent and Ethereum's 23.7 percent gain from 19 to 21 August 2026, two hold up against raw data and one does not. Spot volume counted in coins reached 2.68 times its normal median and US-listed spot ETFs took in $1,610.3m over four sessions, while total stablecoin supply fell 4.0 percent over 90 days. Over the same window gold rose 6.3 percent and the dollar index fell 1.0 percent while equities declined and Treasury yields barely moved, placing the cause in the Treasury's expanded long-dated bond buyback and the macro conditions that produced it. For Ethereum, removing bitcoin's influence statistically collapses its correlation with gold from 0.475 to 0.035, showing the currency-related buying entered bitcoin directly. Across the 32 comparable surges since 2017 this move sits at the median for size and in the top 23 percent for volume, and all 31 completed episodes traded below their surge-end price at some point within 90 days.
- Research·Aug 16, 2026·18 min
Weekly Market Review: Week 33 (August Week 2)
August Week 2 (8/10-8/14) was the week the doubt about pricing power that broke memory a week earlier was overturned. SanDisk jumped 13.68% in the US session on August 13. At its investor day the company said it intends to hold a gross margin of 80% through 2030, and that two-thirds of its 2028 output is already locked into contracts. One week earlier the same company's guidance had broken the storage chain. Once the market that had been doubting unit prices saw the contract book instead, storage and memory were repriced together - for the week SanDisk rose 35.38%, Western Digital 17.15% and Micron 10.72%. Seoul took that repricing hardest. KOSPI climbed five sessions in a row from 6,299.66 on 8/10 to 6,977.94 on 8/14, up 11.49% for the week, and traded as high as 7,010.86 on Friday to briefly reclaim the 7,000 line. Samsung Electronics gained 18.83% on the week and SK Hynix 15.68%. Three things pushed it. Customs data showed exports of $21.3 billion over August 1-10, a record for the period at +45.3%, with semiconductors alone up 155%. Expectations built for large shareholder-return announcements from Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix. And the repricing of US memory carried straight over. Foreigners started the week selling 1.4887 trillion won on 8/10, then bought 2.8357 trillion won on 8/12, 2.1065 trillion won on 8/13 and more than 3 trillion won on 8/14. The United States was quiet - the S&P 500 gained 0.36% for the week, the Nasdaq 0.14%, the Dow fell 0.56%. A cooler July producer price print lifted the S&P 500 to a record close of 7,798.99 on 8/13, but July retail sales fell 0.6% from June, the first decline in nine months, and all three indices slipped on 8/14. Last week's gap of +3.58% in the United States against -5.10% for KOSPI reversed exactly in direction. And within the same AI trade three groups separated - those paid through contracts rose, those funded through debt fell, and the equipment maker that raised both results and guidance fell anyway.
- Research·Aug 9, 2026·32 min
Behind Record Capex, the Memory 3 Are Building Record Return Capacity
The memory 3 are generating quarterly operating profit of 47 to 90 trillion won and, even after record capex, could arithmetically return more than 200 trillion won a year to shareholders combined -- a scale no prior memory cycle has matched, given combined returns never exceeded 20 trillion won a year even at the 2017-18 supercycle's peak. Micron returns 100% of excess cash every year starting December 9, 2026, while Samsung and SK Hynix return 50% of cumulative three-year FCF on a lagged settlement basis. Stock prices in the first week of August moved in line with that difference in policy specificity. Combined capex across the three has more than doubled from the 2023 trough, and given that both prior market collapses came the year after a capex peak, 2027 becomes the window where that pattern will be tested.
- Research·Aug 8, 2026·15 min
Weekly Market Review: Week 32 (August Week 1)
August Week 1 (8/3-8/7) was a week in which two markets read the same AI narrative in opposite directions. On Monday KOSPI handed back part of the prior Friday's 1,001-point surge, closing -5.12% at 6,257.45, while that same night in New York Amazon crossed $3 trillion in market value for the first time on second-quarter revenue of $200.61 billion (+20%) and Amazon Web Services growth of 36.7%, and the S&P 500 cleared 7,600 for the first time. On Tuesday KOSPI rebounded +1.62% (6,358.95) with KOSDAQ surging 5.88%, and in New York the Dow topped 54,000 for the first time on results from Palantir and Caterpillar. On Wednesday foreigners net bought 1.4 trillion won and KOSPI rose +3.76% (6,598.26) back toward its late-July high, while a hyperscaler capital spending forecast of $1.2 trillion and TSMC's raise to $60-64 billion tilted the demand axis bullish. Then on Thursday SanDisk's guidance hit the market - SanDisk fell 11%, Western Digital 16% and Micron 6% as the storage chain broke and the Dow's record run ended, while in Seoul Samsung Electronics fell 6.3% and SK Hynix 10.37% to drag KOSPI down -4.58% (6,296.38). The Nasdaq closed flat at -0.06% the same day. On Friday, July payrolls printed at -23,000 against an expected +80,000; the United States translated the shock into rate-cut expectations and the S&P 500 and Nasdaq both closed at records, while KOSPI slipped -0.60% (6,258.77) on foreign net selling of 863.3 billion won. For the week the S&P 500 rose +3.58%, the Nasdaq +5.19% and the Dow +2.96% against KOSPI's -5.10%, and the won strengthened from 1,429.8 to 1,416.1, a ten-month high. The core of the week is not the drop but the move of the epicenter - that memory broke while capex forecasts stayed raised means the problem shifted from demand to pricing power.
- Research·Aug 1, 2026·38 min
The Unwind of Japanese Money — How Yen Strength Travels Into US Treasuries and Risk Assets
When USD/JPY printed 163.94 in the last week of July, the weakest yen in forty years, Japan and the United States bought yen together across two days. Japan's single-day spend of 8.45 trillion yen was the largest on record, and it is the first time Washington has entered on the yen-buying side since 1998. This report tracks not the intervention itself but the stock behind it. The composition of Japan's 2.5160 trillion dollars in US long-term securities has already shifted from Treasuries to equities, with US stocks alone at 975 billion dollars, or 39 percent. The policy rate gap has narrowed to 2.75 percentage points and the ten-year gap to 1.88, and this time the compression comes from Japan hiking rather than America cutting. Once the unwind ignites, four paths — Treasuries, credit, equities and positioning — operate on different lags, and two of them carry opposite signs for US long-term yields. The measured record of Japan's 2022 Treasury selling, the 2022 UK liability-driven investment episode and the August 2024 carry unwind establishes the size and order of each path. And how fast the 163,412 contracts of speculative shorts rebuilt right up to the eve of the intervention now unwind is what sets the pace of the next phase.
- Research·Aug 1, 2026·15 min
Weekly Market Review: Week 31 (July Week 5)
July Week 5 (7/27-7/31) was a week in which a structural leverage liquidation tore the index in both directions. KOSPI opened quietly on Monday, rising +0.97% to 6,755.75 and retracing part of the prior week's drop. But on Tuesday, memory self-sufficiency fears stirred by China's ChangXin Memory listing the day before combined with suspicions of circular investment in AI, and the index plunged -10.84% to 6,023.66 - Samsung Electronics fell 13.39%, SK Hynix 14.65%, and foreigners net sold 4.97 trillion won in a single day. A sell-side sidecar fired, followed by a first-stage circuit breaker. The decline ran two more days, -5.98% (5,663.24) on Wednesday and -1.23% (5,593.56) on Thursday, marking the week's low. Then on Friday the same machine turned the other way - foreigners net bought 7.22 trillion won (3.61 trillion into SK Hynix, 2.12 trillion into Samsung Electronics) and the index surged +17.91% to 6,595.45. That is 1,001 points, the largest single-day point gain on record. The week ended down only -1.42%, but inside it the index fell from 6,755 to 5,593 and climbed back to 6,595. Over the same stretch the S&P 500 rose from 7,411.98 to 7,489.72, up just +1.05% - the contrast showing this plunge was a local Korean liquidation. In the United States the big-tech earnings season continued, and the confirmation that Microsoft's capex guidance cut from $190 billion to $175 billion was an accounting reclassification rather than a real reduction partly sealed the crack in the capex narrative. What ruled the week was machinery, not narrative. The watchpoints are the 30-million-won deposit rule taking effect on 8/5 and the durability of foreign net buying.
- Company·Jul 31, 2026·36 min
Alphabet — How the Rebound in H100 Rental Prices Redraws Hyperscaler Cash Flow
Alphabet's second quarter of 2026 recorded 82% growth at Google Cloud and the first negative free cash flow since the IPO on the same day. Equity markets answered with a drop while credit markets did not move, and the reason for that gap sits in the price of rented compute. The one-year contracted rate for an H100 rose from a floor of $1.70 an hour in October 2025 to $2.35 by March 2026, about 40% in five months, and on-demand capacity is effectively sold out across accelerator types. If commitments locked in cheaply during the glut renew at 1.5–2 times the trough, revenue per unit of installed capacity rises with no incremental capital spending and the whole operating cash flow path shifts up. This report lays operating cash flow, capex, free cash flow, cloud growth and backlog side by side across the hyperscalers using measured data, and sets out why Alphabet is the operator where that price path is least reflected in reported results — and therefore where the most room remains once it starts to land. It then works through the depreciation curve and the lease backstop structure before fixing the test date on the direction of third-quarter operating cash flow on October 29.
- Company·Jul 31, 2026·35 min
Amazon — Compute Rental Pricing Turned, and the Capex Inflation Is Passing Through
Amazon raised 2026 capex guidance to $220B and attributed the $20B increase to memory pricing. In the same quarter the AWS operating margin hit a record 39.4%. When a margin sets a record in the phase where depreciation is climbing fastest, selling prices rose faster than costs, and the substance behind that price is compute rental pricing. Hourly rental for training-class GPUs fell from $7-10 in early 2024 to $2-4 by the end of 2025, then rebounded roughly 40% in the five months from the autumn 2025 trough, with on-demand capacity effectively sold out. If commitments locked in during the cheap phase are renewed at today's rates, contract pricing lands at 1.5 to 2 times the old level. This report places operating cash flow, capital expenditure, free cash flow, cloud growth and backlog for the major cloud operators on one axis, and sets out the indicators that decide whether −$7.6B of free cash flow is the result of cost pressure or a trough recorded before the price increase lands.
- Company·Jul 31, 2026·28 min
Nebius — GPU Rents Are Rising Again, and Where a Neocloud Sits on the Cloud Cash Flow Map
The GPU rental market has flipped from a buyer's market to a seller's. One-year H100 contract rates bottomed at $1.70 an hour in October 2025 and reached $2.35 by March 2026. Over the same stretch cloud segments at the large providers reaccelerated together, and backlogs swelled to $678 billion at Microsoft, $638 billion at Oracle, $514 billion at Google Cloud and $496 billion at AWS. Rising capital expenditure pushed quarterly free cash flow negative at Google and Amazon, but the market has begun accepting the argument that contracts struck in the cheap period, renewed at one and a half to two times the rate, would change how fast that outlay is recovered. The businesses that feel this most directly are the GPU landlords, for whom the rental rate is the unit price of revenue. Nebius turned $399.0 million of first-quarter 2026 revenue into $2,258 million of operating cash flow — money customers paid in advance. Its selling price is exposed to the upside, its component costs are locked at 2025 prices, and a large share of its equipment funding comes interest-free from customers. One variable remains: the commissioning schedule.
- Company·Jul 31, 2026·30 min
Microsoft — GPU Rental Rates Rebounded 40%, and the Market Started Rereading Cloud Capex
Microsoft shares rose 15.5% in a single session on July 30, 2026. Through 2026 rising hyperscaler capital spending had been bad news, and this company answered five consecutive earnings beats with an average negative move. Explaining the reversal by reacceleration alone gets you halfway. The compute rental market has turned. The one-year contract H100 rental index bottomed at $1.70 an hour in October 2025 and reached $2.35 by March 2026, up roughly 40%, while on-demand capacity is sold out across every GPU type. As one and two-year commitments struck during the 2024 to 2025 trough roll off and renew at 1.5 to 2 times those levels, a window opens in which revenue per unit rises on the installed base with no incremental investment. The path to better free cash flow runs through price rather than volume. Part of the market has begun accepting that assumption, and the numbers in this quarter do not contradict it. Azure grew 43% in constant currency with a 45% guide for the coming quarter, commercial remaining performance obligation reached $678 billion, and quarterly operating cash flow hit an all-time high of $55.4 billion. In the same quarter Alphabet posted its first negative free cash flow on record and Amazon its second consecutive negative quarter, while this company held $19.6 billion positive with no new issuance.
- Research·Jul 25, 2026·15 min
Weekly Market Review: Week 30 (July Week 4)
July Week 4 (7/20-7/24) was a whipsaw week in which, amid AI-chip deleveraging, KOSPI swung between crashes and surges every other day. On Monday the index opened -4.46% lower at 6,516.27, belatedly pricing the Philadelphia Semiconductor Index's bear-market entry that had happened while Seoul rested for Constitution Day on 7/17 - a sell-side sidecar fired on both markets and KOSDAQ surrendered the 750 line. On Tuesday, when customs data showed July 1-20 exports at a record $54.9 billion and semiconductors surging 180.6% to $22.1 billion, the index rebounded +3.56% to 6,747.95, reclaiming 6,700. After widening the rebound +0.74% (6,797.70) on Wednesday, it jumped +4.40% to 7,096.89 on Thursday, stepping back onto 7,000 - a bullish bet reading Alphabet's Cloud +82% reacceleration as confirmation of memory demand. But the other face of the same Alphabet print - an FY26 capex guidance raise to $195-205 billion and a buyback halt - hit New York on 7/23. The Nasdaq fell 2.15% and the fear gauge jumped more than 12%, reigniting the AI capex-return debate. On Friday KOSPI took that headwind, and with a SanDisk -11% US chip selloff layered on, it plunged -5.72% to 6,690.62, handing back the entire week's rebound. SK Hynix and Samsung led the drop. For the week the index lost only about -1.9%, but its intraday range spanned 6,516-7,096, a swing of 9% in a single week. It was the week a Cloud +82% pushed the index up and a capex raise pulled it back. The watchpoints are SK Hynix earnings on 7/29 and the leverage curb taking effect on 8/5.
- Research·Jul 21, 2026·105 min
Who Gets Paid First
The AI infrastructure trade is now repriced not by 'which theme you belong to' but by 'who gets paid first and who is left holding only a claim.' In July 2026, after a record momentum-factor liquidation and the Kimi K3 shock, the credit market has split the same hyperscalers' default insurance threefold while the equity market still calls them one bucket. Even within 'memory,' an LTA-protected contract asset and a spot-exposed asset sit at different points in the payment order; even within 'power,' an equipment maker paid on delivery and an SPV that recovers via rent sit at opposite ends of the spectrum. This report adds a vertical axis dividing prepaid from deferred to the four-tier settlement system, dissecting the payment structure of the AI infrastructure stack. Prepaid physical nodes — power equipment, the memory value-chain base, contract assets, custom silicon — are the seats paid first even as the cycle wobbles, while the risk of the 2027 funding convergence concentrates on deferred claims — contract-form neoclouds, lab equity, datacenter SPVs and private credit. Oracle, where credit led equity, is the proof of that divergence.
- Research·Jul 20, 2026·96 min
A Comparative Study of Memory Cycles — Five Winters, and a Sixth Question
Across thirty years and five memory winters, demand never once died — supply grew faster than demand, and share prices always broke one to two quarters ahead of earnings. The correction since the June 2026 peak — SOX −20.2%, KOSPI −28.5% — is unfolding alongside record earnings, consistent with the leading pattern repeated in all five precedents. DRAM contract-price growth has decelerated from the 90%s in Q1 to a 13-18% Q3 forecast, placing the price cycle in its late-upcycle phase. This cycle's three novel structures — the HBM wafer valve, token demand elasticity above 1, and five-year take-or-pay contracts — raise the floor of a downturn rather than prevent oversupply, and each carries an unverified limit. The battleground is when the 2027-28 capacity wave flips the sign of the growth gap, and how deep the downturn runs — minus 50% or minus 15%.
- Research·Jul 20, 2026·59 min
The Great Open-Weight Migration — the Four-Layer Remapping of AI Margins After K3
Moonshot AI's 2.8-trillion-parameter open-weight model Kimi K3 is not an event that evaporates AI margins — it is the starting gun of a great migration that moves margin from the model layer to the infrastructure layer. Around K3's release the Philadelphia Semiconductor Index fell 20.2% from its peak into a technical bear market and $3.3 trillion of global semiconductor market cap evaporated. But split the AI value chain into four layers — closed labs, serving providers, hyperscalers, neoclouds — and the sign of the shock differs by layer. Open weights attack only the frontier-gap premium; lock-in and regulatory premiums hold, and the compute to build gets compressed while the compute to serve gets bigger. The benefit ranking runs hardware including memory, model-neutral AWS and vertically integrated Google, then spot neoclouds and heavyweight serving, while the pressure concentrates on second-tier closed models and long-tail serving. The only malignant path is a four-step domino from Layer 1 margin compression through an OpenAI IPO disappointment into hyperscaler capex cuts — and adjudication runs on an observation calendar that starts with Alphabet's earnings on July 22.
- Research·Jul 19, 2026·15 min
Weekly Market Review: Week 29 (July Week 3)
July Week 3 (7/13-7/16) was the week AI-chip deleveraging took the controls of KOSPI — over four sessions the index swung -8.95%, +0.73%, +6.24%, -6.37%, leaving amplitude but no direction. On Black Monday 7/13, KOSPI collapsed -8.95% to 6,806.93, surrendering the 7,000 line for the first time in two months and triggering the seventh circuit breaker of the year — SK Hynix -15.37%, Samsung -10.70%. The +6.24% surge on 7/15, fueled by cooling US CPI, was given back within a day. On 7/16 alone, the Bank of Korea's first rate hike in three and a half years, the regulators' single-stock leverage curb (a 30 million won deposit, cash only), and fear of ChangXin Memory's record $8.55 billion STAR Market IPO all converged, and KOSPI closed the week down -6.37% at 6,820.60. The week lost -8.77%, a second straight weekly rout. Yet the won strengthened from 1,501.4 to 1,480.4, and on 7/16 retail bought 4.8 trillion won against 5 trillion of institutional and foreign selling. On 7/17, while Seoul rested for Constitution Day, the Philadelphia Semiconductor Index closed -20.2% below its peak, entering a bear market — Seoul opens Monday carrying that decline. The watchpoints: SK Hynix earnings on 7/29 and the asymmetric window before the curb takes effect on 8/5.
- Research·Jul 16, 2026·16 min
Anatomy of a Deleveraging — When Korea's Leverage Curb Lands on the Momentum Unwind
Korea's July 16 curb on single-stock leveraged products does not cause the deleveraging — it layers a retail releveraging block on top of a global momentum unwind already in motion. KOSPI fell 6.37% on announcement day, stopping twenty points above Goldman's 6,800 support, and the products' net assets had already shrunk 40% from peak before the rule. The curb removes the mechanical buyer of rallies first while the mechanical seller of declines persists — the window before early-August implementation is the most asymmetric stretch. Micron is the #1 holding of US momentum indices and Samsung plus SK Hynix are a third of MSCI EM Momentum, so Korea's crash and the US momentum breakdown are two faces of the same factor. Two institutional cohorts have largely sold; the remaining variable is retail capitulation.
- Research·Jul 15, 2026·36 min
ChangXin Memory (CXMT) — The Price of the Listing Venue: Deconstructing China's DRAM Champion IPO
In the STAR Market IPO of ChangXin Memory, China's DRAM champion, the first variable setting the post-listing valuation is neither DRAM prices nor the HBM technology gap but the listing venue itself. At an 8.66-yuan offer price and a 57.9-billion-yuan raise it is the largest STAR Market IPO ever, with a day-one float of just 6% of shares outstanding. The dual-pricing structure — the same Chinese semiconductor asset trades at a 30% discount in Hong Kong and at multi-fold premiums in A-shares — is the identity of the 2-3 trillion yuan consensus. The global memory yardstick caps the company at 1 trillion yuan; supply-demand and the A-share yardstick pay the rest. The premium expires in July 2027 when the lockups release, and for Korea's memory big three the listing is near-term neutral and a post-2028 trough-amplitude variable.
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