Taiwan's Taiex hit a record intraday high Tuesday. Tech stocks went up. Wall Street had an AI rally the day before. Taiwan followed. This is what passes for causation in financial journalism.
The word "driven" appeared in the summary. Driven. As if stocks are cars with steering wheels and the tech sector grabbed the wheel and said we're going to record highs whether you like it or not. Nobody drives stocks. Stocks wiggle around because people click buttons and sometimes the wiggling goes up and sometimes it goes down and occasionally it goes up enough that someone writes "record high" in a headline.
An AI-driven rally on Wall Street preceded this. AI-driven. The robots are trading now. The algorithms are sentient. They've achieved consciousness and decided Taiwan semiconductors are undervalued. Or maybe some funds rebalanced and a Tuesday happened and numbers got bigger and nobody knows why but we have to file copy by 4 p.m. so we say AI did it.
Here's what actually happened: a line went up. That's it. The line went up on a chart in Taiwan. It went higher than it went before. People who owned the things represented by the line can now sell those things for more money than they could yesterday. People who don't own the things will read this headline and think they missed something. They didn't miss anything. The line went up. Tomorrow it might go down. Next week it might go sideways. None of this has anything to do with news.
Retail traders are Googling "how to buy Taiwan stocks" right now. They're looking up Taiex ETFs. They're reading three-year-old Reddit threads about TSMC. By the time they fund their accounts and figure out the ticker symbols, the record high will be a record low compared to whatever chaos happens next. But sure, chase that intraday high. I'm sure it'll still be there when your wire transfer clears.
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