Where will the stock market go after Chuseok? The decisive variable is... | Lee Sun-yup, CEO of AFW Partners [Weekend Interview]

Lee Sun-yup interprets the Korean stock market's pattern of early strength followed by later weakness before Chuseok as reflecting individual investors selling to break even and complex trading flows, rather than deteriorating corporate earnings. He believes a strong rebound requires foreign capital inflows and a recovery in market confidence. He argues that despite China's memory capacity expansion, hyperscalers' financing burdens, and data center regulations, the spread of new AI models and personal assistant services could generate greater GPU and memory demand than previously expected. He identifies a key turning point as checking next year's revenue and profit outlook and how long supply shortages will persist in Micron's earnings announcement immediately after the holiday, and whether US and Korean share prices actually respond to that information. If tariff relief and negotiations with Iran advance at the US–China summit, pressures from oil prices and interest rates could ease. However, he also cautions that if the United States makes concessions to China on strategic products, Korean companies' indirect benefits could weaken. Because bull markets tend to concentrate on leading industries rather than lift every sector together, he advises broadening the range of investments considered beyond Korean semiconductor companies to include US AI model, service, power, and application companies. He says a 5% yield on US 10-year Treasuries is clearly a burden, but rather than declaring a turning point for stocks based on a single interest-rate figure, investors should examine financing conditions for companies vulnerable to borrowing pressures and deterioration in high-yield credit spreads. His conclusion is that investors should avoid leaning exclusively toward optimism or pessimism and establish criteria for revising their views when conditions involving AI demand, earnings, trading flows, and credit markets change. All directional outlooks are the speaker's conditional judgments, not definitive short-term price predictions.