Episode#25 | August 2026: TIPS and tricks

So, I mean, you're saying that the markets, equity markets, are pretty sanguine at the moment.

What happened over the month in the Aussie market, the US market, and so on?

Well, sanguine at the headline level, but like the duck swimming across the pond, there was a hell of a lot going on underneath.

July saw a huge rotation out of semiconductor-related stocks.

So the Philadelphia Semiconductor Index, or SOX, S-O-X, that was down around fractionally over 20% for the month, as was the Korean KOSPI.

Now both these indices are very heavily weighted.

towards these semiconductor stocks.

So in the US, for example, we're talking about companies like Applied Materials, Advanced Micro Devices, Broadcom, NVIDIA, Qualcomm, Intel.

These are big names, Taiwan Semiconductor, Texas Instruments.

These are the types of stocks that we see represented in the semiconductor index in the US.

And similarly in Korea, we're seeing some big names and Some huge volatility.

Now, both of these indices, both the SOX and the COSB, they'd already risen, I think, around 100%.

So they doubled to the end of June and they've given up, well, just 20% in July.

But just symptomatic of the fact that there's huge volatility going on.

underneath the surface.

But broadly speaking, US markets were sort of flat to slightly down.

I think the S&P fell to 0.1. NASDAQ a little bit softer than that.

Here in Australia, we actually eked out again.

Not often that the Aussie market outperforms at the moment.

but we did, although our small cap index fell over the course of the month.

We've seen volatility as well in Japan.

The Japanese market gave up some of its recent gains in July as well, but again, we'd seen a period where the Nikkei and the topics had performed incredibly strongly up until the end of June.

So giving back some of that.

And that's sort of semiconductor related as well.

So, I mean, clearly the war has not finished.