Clouds Carried the Rally, Chips Caught Their Breath

US stocks had a strong day — the S&P 500 up 1.54% and the Nasdaq up 2.62%. Cloud names did the heavy lifting, while AI and chip stocks, still shaky from recent days, kept lagging behind — money was clearly splitting into two camps. Wall Street's read on the chip selloff was that the underlying supply-shortage story is still intact, and that view got a boost when SK Chairman Chey Tae-won made his first-ever purchase of SK Hynix shares, about 4.8 billion won worth — together they tilted the mood toward "pullback, not trend break." That said, the Fed's hawkish hold and talk of the Bank of Korea hiking again show the rate pressure hasn't fully lifted, which is basically what played out in Korea, where the Kospi surged only to give it all back and close down near 1%, slipping below the 5,600 line. Still, with exports and employment holding up the real economy and FX/commodity conditions staying friendly, I'd call this more of a rotation playing out than pure noise. I didn't put anything new on today — just watching how this shakes out.