The U.S. Market Is On Fire, But One Surprising Country Has Outperformed U.S. Stocks 10-to-1 Since the Start of 2025

The iShares MSCI South Korea ETF has risen about 303% in U.S. dollar terms since the start of 2025, while the SPDR S&P 500 ETF has gained about 30% over the same period. Korean equities are therefore delivering roughly ten times the U.S. return. EWY trades around $205.52 after a 4% daily rise, while SPY trades around $750.46. The rally is powered by a memory supercycle tied to AI infrastructure buildouts. EWY is heavily concentrated in Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix, which together represent over half the portfolio. Their market capitalizations have reached $1 trillion each due to high-bandwidth memory chips used in AI servers. U.S. memory and AI infrastructure companies show strong growth, including Micron’s revenue and margin expansion and NVIDIA’s rapid data center networking growth, both reflecting sustained AI demand for memory.

"EWY shares traded near $205.52 midday Thursday, after climbing 4% on the session. SPY shares sit at $750.46, up 27% over one year, a strong number that looks pedestrian against the global leaderboard. The figures come from a Charlie Bilello and Creative Planning chart shared on X showing 2025-2026 total returns in U.S. dollars. SPY and the broader U.S. market are on fire by any normal standard. They're just global laggards right now, and that challenges the "U.S. exceptionalism" trade that has dominated allocations for years."

"EWY is concentrated in two names that have become indispensable to the AI buildout: Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix. The two stocks together comprise over half of the EWY portfolio and have achieved $1 trillion market capitalizations on the strength of high-bandwidth memory (HBM) chips used in AI servers. The same secular force has lit up U.S. memory names. Micron Technology ( NASDAQ:MU) reported fiscal Q1 2026 revenue of $13.64 billion, up 57% year over year, with Cloud Memory Business Unit revenue nearly doubling to $5.28 billion at a 66% gross margin."

"CEO Sanjay Mehrotra declared, "Micron delivered record revenue and significant margin expansion at the company level and also in each of our business units." NVIDIA ( NASDAQ:NVDA) just posted Q1 FY2027 revenue of $81.6 billion, up 85% year over year, with Data Center Networking revenue surging 199% to $14.8 billion. CEO Jensen Huang called the AI factory buildout "the largest infrastructure expansion in human history." Every one of those AI factories needs Korean memory, and SK Hynix is NVIDIA's leadin"

Read at 24/7 Wall St.