SKHY Slides Again as Goldman Pegs $5 Billion of Forced ETF Selling in SK Hynix

The Unwind Nobody Turned Off

SKHY's slide to $161.90 isn't a fresh fundamental shock — it's the same leveraged-ETF unwind that has been mechanically pulling SK Hynix lower all week, still running. Goldman Sachs estimated that after SK Hynix's record ~15% single-day drop in Seoul, leveraged funds needed to sell roughly $5 billion of the stock to keep their exposure in line — about 18% of the combined share-and-futures volume that session. That is not price discovery; that is forced deleveraging. More than a dozen single-stock leveraged products tracking SK Hynix and Samsung are now down roughly 40% since their May listings, and the daily-reset design means every leg lower forces more selling into the close. The Hyperliquid perp has turned over about $411 million in 24 hours as traders position around the unwind.

The Machine Cuts Both Ways

The tell that this is mechanical, not fundamental, is how violently it reverses. When SK Hynix's US line jumped 27% mid-week, foreign investors bought about $1.5 billion of index members — the same rebalancing engine running in reverse. Korea's regulators saw the loop clearly: the KOSPI has swung close to 1,000 points in two days as forced selling repeatedly deepened market strain, which is why the Financial Services Commission moved to halt new single-stock leveraged ETF listings and raise the minimum deposit to trade them to 30 million won. That addresses the cause. It does not undo the roughly $9 billion already sitting in these products, and the near-term path is still one of unwinding — an expert-flagged 'vicious circle' where each forced sale invites the next.

The ADR Amplifier

For SKHY specifically, the ADR structure concentrates the pain. Each ADS represents one-tenth of a Seoul-listed common share, so it inherits every won of the Korean selloff and then adds its own: the ADR has been trading at a premium to its home line, and a premium compresses fastest when sentiment turns. Layer in thin new-listing liquidity and an overnight US chip tape that has been souring on AI-memory valuations, and the ADR ends up absorbing both the Seoul unwind and the New York risk-off in a single session. Until the leveraged-ETF pile is meaningfully smaller, SKHY's range will be set less by SK Hynix's fundamentals than by how much stock the machine still has to sell.