Goldman Sachs: The influence of semiconductors on the financial market has far exceeded that of oil.

With the ongoing AI boom, the attention of global financial asset markets has shifted from the traditional bulk commodity market fluctuations in the past to the volatility of AI-related concept stocks.

Goldman Sachs says artificial intelligence has become an extremely influential force in the global financial market. Today, the influence of semiconductor stocks on the price fluctuations of various major asset classes far exceeds that of oil prices.

Chip Market Trends Affect the Entire Market

This Monday, analysts at Goldman Sachs released a research note stating: "The driving effect of the technology sector on market risk appetite is continuously rising."

The bank's research found that in the past three weeks, the performance changes of the semiconductor sector can explain about 54% of the performance differences of various assets; while oil prices only account for 2% of the explanation for the performance of various assets.

Goldman Sachs' research results also reflect that the sentiment of global investors of all types of assets is already highly tied to tech stocks. This correlation has continued to strengthen in recent years, and the risk appetite indicator tracked by the bank has recently moved almost in sync with the relative trend of large-cap tech stocks.

Last week, as US tech stocks and corporate bonds were sold off, Goldman Sachs' indicator measuring investors' willingness to take on risk once fell to the lowest level since April 2025.

However, Goldman Sachs strategists pointed out that the current market sentiment has not yet fallen to the historically suitable range for position building and buying.

This Monday, market sentiment saw a relatively obvious turnaround: as Anthropic submitted its IPO application, the bullish enthusiasm for AI-related stocks was rekindled, and the overall US stock market rebounded accordingly. Both the Nasdaq Composite Index and the S&P 500 Index rose, with NVIDIA up more than 2%, and the Philadelphia Semiconductor Index climbing 3%.

This wave of gains spread to the Asian market on Tuesday. South Korea's Kospi index rose as much as 5% intraday, Samsung Electronics rose as much as 6%, and SK Hynix's gain once reached 8%.

The South Korean Market Is Particularly Sensitive to AI Market Trends

Goldman Sachs also specifically found that the South Korean stock market has an exceptionally prominent sensitivity to AI trading trends, and memory chip stocks have a weight close to half in the Kospi index.

With the recent pullback in share prices of memory stocks led by SK Hynix and Samsung Electronics, the South Korean KOSPI index has now fallen by a total of about 40% from its high in June. The selling pressure has also spread to targets outside South Korea's chip industry.

Goldman Sachs estimates that after excluding the memory chip sector, the remaining South Korean individual stocks have a valuation discount of more than 30% relative to their own earnings levels.

Goldman Sachs analysts said in another research note on Sunday: "Due to risk-aversion operations in the market, concerns about the memory sector have spilled over to the entire market."

The bank believes that the South Korean stock market is clearly oversold, and lowered the 12-month target level of the Kospi index from 12000 to 9000, but this target level still implies an upside of more than 60% compared with the index level at the time of the research note's release.

Goldman Sachs strategists said: "Current market pricing has priced in overly pessimistic fundamental expectations."

This article is from the WeChat official account "CLS.cn", author: Liu Rui, published with authorization from 36Kr.