The Open Bell — Ep. 026 — 28 Jul 2026

Today on The Open Bell: South Korea had to hit the pause button on its entire stock market this morning as the global bet on AI spending started looking a lot shakier than it did last week. A Chinese memory chip company you've almost certainly never heard of briefly became worth more than Walmart on its very first day of trading, and that tells you something important about where Beijing thinks the real war in tech is being fought. While everyone was watching chips crater, Europe's economy quietly crossed back into growth for the first time in months, which is either a genuine turning point or the most poorly timed piece of good news in recent memory. If this helped you make sense of a genuinely strange day in markets, a quick rating on Apple Podcasts or Spotify helps the next listener find the show. Hosted by Alex Monroe. New episodes every weekday morning at theopenbell.co Not investment advice. For informational purposes only. --- Chapters: 00:00 Introduction 00:14 Korea halts trading as Kospi plunges 9% on AI spending doubt 03:00 China's CXMT IPO surges 535% on Shanghai debut, valued at $4 05:09 Eurozone and UK PMIs return to expansion, lifting European s 07:07 Closing thoughts

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Good morning. It's Tuesday, 28th July, 2026, and this is the Open Bell. I'm Alex Monroe. Six days ago, South Korea's biggest chip stocks were leading Asia higher on AI optimism. This morning, Seoul halted trading because they're leading it off a cliff. Cast your mind back to last Tuesday when we covered the Cosby rallying more than 5.5% on AI chip euphoria, Samsung up, SK Heinex up, the whole region riding the wave of Alphabet's spending plans and what they meant for semiconductor demand. That thesis has now reversed in almost exactly the same size. Souls Exchange triggered what's called a sidecar this morning, an automatic pause on all program sell orders when the futures market, the contracts that let institutions bet on where the index goes next, falls more than 5% in under 60 seconds. It fired at just after 9 in the morning local time. It was the 22nd time it's happened this year. 22nd. Here's what's driving it. SK Heinex, the memory chip giant that supplies much of the world's AI infrastructure, fell as much as 13%. Samsung Electronics dropped up to 10%. Together, they account for enough of the Korean benchmark that when they move that sharply, the index moves with them. And the Cosby fell 9%. Japan's Nikkei and Taiwan's benchmark each fell close to 4%. The MSCI Asia Pacific Index, a broad measure of stock performance across the region, slipped 3%. This wasn't a sole problem, it was an Asia-wide repricing of the same idea. The idea being repriced is this that the enormous amounts of money tech giants are spending on AI infrastructure will eventually produce returns big enough to justify the spend. We covered Alphabet raising its full year capital expenditure guidance to somewhere between $195 and $205 billion last week. And the market reacted badly then too. What's changed overnight is that the doubt has spread from is Alphabet's spend too high to is the entire AI investment cycle built on a return horizon nobody can actually see? That's a different question. And it's a scarier one. The counterargument is real and worth taking seriously. TSMC, the Taiwanese company that physically manufactures most of the world's advanced chips, posted revenue growth of nearly 68% year on year in June. That is not a company whose customers are pulling back. And demand for AI chips, by that measure, remains genuinely strong. The sell-off may be over correction rather than correction. But over correction or not, if you hold a pension fund, a global tech tracker, or any kind of diversified equity savings product, the sole listed portion of that portfolio just had 9% erased from it overnight. The Asian Development Bank had already trimmed its developing Asia growth forecast to just under 5% for this year, down from 5.5% last year. This morning's moves add to that pressure. The 22nd circuit breaker in seven months tells you something. The headline number alone doesn't. This market has been swinging violently all year, and the mechanisms designed to slow it down have been working overtime. Now, here's the thing. While Seoul was halting trading on AI spending doubt, Shanghai was doing the opposite. China's CXMtai, short for Changsin Memory Technologies, made its debut on the Shanghai Stock Exchange yesterday and surged as much as 535% on its first day of trading. That's not a typo. 535. At its peak, the company briefly reached a market capitalization, total market value of around $490 billion. That would make it China's largest onshore listed company. The IPO raised about $8.5 billion, making it the biggest share sale anywhere in Asia so far this year. CXMT is a state-backed maker of DRAM. Dynamic Random Access Memory, the type of chip that handles active data processing in everything from smartphones to AI servers. It is, in plain terms, Beijing's answer to SK Heinex and Micron. Those are the companies US export controls have been specifically designed to protect by restricting Chinese firms' access to advanced chip manufacturing equipment and technology. So what you're watching is Beijing routing state capital directly into the one part of the semiconductor supply chain it doesn't yet control. And Chinese retail investors, starved of domestic chip names to buy, piled in. The Saudi Aramco parallel is instructive here. When Saudi Arabia listed its national oil company in 2019, the IPO raised more than $25 billion, briefly made Aramco the world's most valuable company, and was driven at least as much by geopolitical strategy as commercial logic. The shares then retraced significantly over the following months once the debut premium faded. A 500 plus percent first aid move on a state-backed IPO almost certainly reflects supply scarcity and retail enthusiasm more than fundamental valuation. And CXMT's technology is still roughly one to two generations behind leading edge dram from its Western rivals. Beijing can fund the ambition, it can't shortcut the physics of chip development. But here's what matters beyond the frothy debut number. If CXMT accelerates China's domestic memory chip production over the next three to five years, it reshapes the global supply picture for the chips inside your phone and laptop, potentially pushing prices down as a second major supply source comes online, while simultaneously squeezing the Western firms that currently dominate that market. Pull back from Asia entirely, and there's a genuinely different story developing in Europe, one that's been almost completely drowned out by the chip noise. Flash PMI data, purchasing managers index surveys, which ask businesses whether activity is expanding or contracting with anything above 50 meaning growth, came in yesterday for both the Eurozone and the UK, and both crossed back above that 50 threshold for the first time in four months. The Eurozone composite reading hit 51.9, its highest in five months. The UK composite jumped to 52.1 from 49.3 the month before, a sharp move that caught most forecasters offside. Germany's DAX gained about 1.25% on the day. The FETC 100 added two-thirds of a percent. France and Italy both moved higher. What this does practically is reduce the pressure on the European Central Bank and the Bank of England to cut interest rates aggressively. We covered the ECB's September meeting as a live risk for a rate hike given oil-driven inflation. And this data doesn't change that calculus, it reinforces it. An economy that's growing, even modestly, doesn't need emergency rate relief. The Bank of England meets on Thursday and is widely expected to hold its benchmark rate at 3.75%. Yesterday's PMI print makes that call even more straightforward. The honest caveat PMI surveys measure sentiment and intention, not actual output. An energy cost from the Iran situation, plus sticky services inflation, could pull these readings back below 50 in August just as quickly as they recovered. One month of expansion is a floor, not a trend. Still, for the 450 million people living and working across the Eurozone and the UK, an economy that isn't contracting is genuinely better than the alternative. Jobs get created, not cut. The probability of a recession-driven redundancy wave falls. Europe's economy quietly crossed back into growth territory in July. And almost nobody noticed because a chip stock panic was happening at the same time. So here's what today actually tells us. The AI investment cycle is hitting its credibility test in real time. Markets will fund the vision, but only up to the point where they need to see the return. Seoul's 22nd circuit breaker this year, Shanghai's 500% debut, and a surprisingly resilient European economy all point at the same underlying tension. Capital is moving fast in large amounts, and the question of where it actually generates value is very much unsettled. The Bank of England's rate decision on Thursday is the next number worth watching. A hold is expected, but two members voted to hike as recently as June, and the PMI data we covered today gives the Hawks more to work with. If you want today's figures in writing, the Cosby move, the CXMT debut number, the PMI print, the newsletter has all of it, it's free, and there's a link in the show notes. That's the open bell. I'm Alex Monroe, have a sharp morning.