“I want to go back to life before I started trading stocks.”
That line opens a TechFlowPost commentary by Dou Wanle, which uses South Korea’s July 2026 selloff to make a broader point: global equities, especially technology shares, are starting to look a lot more like crypto.
On July 13, 2026, in Seoul, the KOSPI fell 8.95% in one day, marking the seventh circuit breaker of the year. SK Hynix, described in the piece as a Korean “national destiny stock,” dropped 15.37% in a single session, its harshest fall in nearly two decades. Samsung Electronics lost more than 10%.
More than 1.2 million leveraged accounts received margin call notices. Brokerage systems automatically liquidated between 320,000 and 460,000 accounts. Among those wiped out, 62% were people in their 20s and 30s, according to the article. Some lost money set aside for a home down payment, while others had borrowed to buy stocks.
The piece also cites a violent case in Busan, where a man in his 20s allegedly stabbed a stock YouTuber after losing money on a recommendation.
Scenes once associated with crypto crashes are now showing up in the post-boom unwind across South Korea, the U.S., and Japan, the commentary says. Big moves are only the surface. Underneath, the pricing mechanism has changed: narratives override valuation, leverage amplifies emotion, and social media pushes consensus to extremes at high speed.
“Welcome back to your original family”
After the selloff, traders who had left crypto for stocks began posting loss diaries, and one comment kept reappearing: “Welcome back to your original family.”
In the article, that “original family” means crypto. It says that from the second half of 2025 to early 2026, many experienced crypto KOLs and long-time participants began losing confidence in the market. Bitcoin moved sideways, trading volume weakened, and meme coins kept cycling through waves of speculation and losses. A number of traders started shifting their attention to U.S. equities.
On paper, that move made sense. Stocks came with revenue, profits, earnings reports, and Securities and Exchange Commission oversight. Compared with crypto projects that lacked cash flow and depended heavily on consensus for pricing, equities looked more mature and safer.
What moved with those traders was not only liquidity. Their method came too.
In crypto, they were used to chasing new narratives, looking for high-beta names, using leverage, and rotating positions quickly based on social sentiment. Once they entered the stock market, that playbook barely changed. The targets changed instead: AI names, memory stocks, and leveraged ETFs. For a while, the trade worked.
Memory shares became a new consensus trade. The logic was straightforward: AI servers needed more high-bandwidth memory, HBM was in short supply, and rising memory prices appeared to make Micron, Samsung Electronics, and SK Hynix the clearest “picks and shovels” beneficiaries. The phrase “storage is always in shortage” spread widely. Some crypto KOLs began talking about U.S. stocks, the memory cycle, and AI capital spending, while 2x long SK Hynix products were promoted as a more “efficient” way to express the same view.
Then the market turned in July.
Bitcoin started to look like the lower-volatility asset
The commentary asks a simple question: how long does it take for an asset to fall by half from its peak?
Bitcoin took 268 days. Silver took 169 days to post a similar drawdown. By contrast, SanDisk fell about 55% in 36 days, while SK Hynix dropped about 53% in 34 days.
In other words, what took Bitcoin close to nine months took memory stocks just over a month.
That is the strange part of this cycle, the article argues. Investors used to worry about Bitcoin swinging wildly in a matter of days while stocks adjusted more slowly through earnings and valuation. Now some technology stocks are completing a full boom-and-bust sequence faster than crypto.
Against that backdrop, Bitcoin can appear relatively stable.
Charles Schwab data cited in the article shows Bitcoin had historical volatility of about 42% in 2025 and a maximum drawdown of roughly 32%. Over the same period, Tesla posted volatility of about 63% and a 48% maximum drawdown, while Nvidia showed volatility of about 50% and a 37% maximum drawdown.
Bitcoin is still a high-risk asset. The point is narrower: some mega-cap technology stocks have been even more volatile. The article also notes that Bitwise, in its 2026 outlook, predicted Bitcoin’s overall volatility could remain below Nvidia’s.
The result is a reversal that would have sounded backward not long ago: Bitcoin is becoming more like a tech stock, while tech stocks are becoming more like Bitcoin.
When story becomes the valuation anchor
Crypto traders often say they are really trading narrative. The TechFlowPost piece argues that global technology equities in 2026 have turned that line into a market rule.
AI is not fictional. Nvidia, Microsoft, Google, and major cloud companies have real revenue and are spending real money on data centers. Still, there is a long distance between “AI will create value” and “any company linked to AI deserves to be bought at any price.” At the hottest point of the rally, the market skipped that distance altogether.
AI servers, optical modules, memory chips, data centers, power equipment, and even nuclear-energy companies could all surge if they were placed somewhere inside the AI supply chain. Businesses were still in planning mode and orders had not necessarily landed, yet the market priced them on the basis of an ideal future outcome several years away.
In South Korea, the story was that AI semiconductors were tied to national fortune. As the KOSPI kept hitting highs, more families opened stock accounts for underage children and treated Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix as long-term gifts.
Mainland China’s A-share market showed its own version of concentration. In the first half of 2026, the TMT sector’s market value reached 41.78 trillion yuan, or about 31.45% of the entire A-share market. On some trading days, technology shares accounted for nearly half of total turnover.
In the U.S., the market had long been pricing around a small number of large technology companies. Once index gains depended more and more on a handful of stocks, and funds, options traders, and retail investors crowded into the same names, portfolios that looked diversified on the surface were all leaning on one AI story underneath.
The article draws a direct comparison with earlier crypto episodes. Dogecoin’s 2021 surge was not driven by a technical breakthrough, it says, but by a tweet from Elon Musk. In 2026, the jump in technology shares was not because every company suddenly delivered explosive results. It was because ChatGPT convinced the market that AI would rewrite everything.
Distribution channels matter as well. Investors once relied mainly on earnings reports, sell-side research, and institutional roadshows. Now more decisions are being shaped by YouTube, X, short-video apps, and paid communities.
Complex company analysis gets compressed into a few lines: time will prove the case for computing power and optical modules, or AI compute will never be enough. Social media algorithms do not reward caution, the commentary says. Overnight riches remain the best traffic driver. Stories of options positions doubling overnight, workers achieving financial freedom by loading up on memory names, and leveraged ETF gains covering several years of salary all became part of the sales pitch.
Price charts did the rest. Mothers, older retail investors, and other newcomers brought household savings into the market. Some even sold homes to trade stocks. The article likens it to the students who dropped out and went all-in on Web3 a few years earlier.
The leverage loop
The most dangerous part of crypto is not volatility by itself. It is volatility combined with leverage. The commentary argues that global equities in 2026 have reproduced that dynamic with surprising precision.
On May 27, 2026, the Korea Exchange approved the listing of 16 single-stock 2x leveraged ETFs tied to Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix.
Retail investors piled in. From the time of approval to mid-July, Korean retail traders bought a cumulative 14 trillion won, or about RMB 64 billion, of single-stock leveraged ETFs. Foreign investors bought only about 2 trillion won over the same period.
The article says these products carry several dangerous design features.
First, they rebalance every day. The more violent the swings, the larger the drag on net asset value. If a stock falls 10% and then rises 11.1%, the share price can return to flat. The corresponding 2x leveraged product, though, would fall 20% and then rise 22.2%, still ending down about 2.2%.
Second, the problem worsens in a fast selloff. To maintain target leverage, the fund has to cut exposure after prices fall. That selling pushes the underlying stock lower, which then triggers more deleveraging, stop-loss activity, and fresh margin pressure.
Goldman Sachs later said that the “rapid deleveraging” tied to these products was the main reason behind the KOSPI’s abnormal intraday volatility. According to the article, 62% of institutional net selling came from ETF-related liquidations.
Two months later, South Korean regulators moved to halt all new single-stock leveraged ETF listings. They also raised the minimum margin requirement from 10 million won to 30 million won and required cash only.
By then, the damage had already been done. Forced liquidations totaled 2.3 trillion won, and the article says the wealth of hundreds of thousands of households was wiped out.
Even the U.S. market, the deepest equity market in the world, is not immune. The commentary cites JPMorgan analysts as saying U.S. stocks still have room to deleverage and may need three months to return to pre-April levels.
It also says the ratio between memory-chip leveraged ETF assets and the market capitalization of their underlying stocks is three times the average level for all stock ETFs. Even across leveraged equity index ETFs as a whole, that ratio remains high relative to its own history.
A degradation in the trading layer
The article is careful to draw a boundary. “Crypto-ization” does not mean stocks and cryptocurrencies have become identical.
Stocks still represent companies, assets, revenue, and cash flow. They still sit inside systems of disclosure, audit, and regulation. Even after sentiment fades, a profitable company still has a value that can be estimated.
The real change, it says, is happening at the trading layer.
Investors once bought a company’s future profits. Increasingly, they are trading the heat of a theme instead. In that sense, the crypto-ization of the stock market is described as a move away from rationality: traditional equities focus on price-to-earnings ratios and cash flow, while crypto-like equities trade on narrative and imagination; in a traditional market, 20% volatility is already elevated, while in a crypto-like stock market, 10% to 15% single-day moves in individual names become normal.
The same shift appears in tools, information, and behavior. Traditional stock leverage came through margin financing and securities lending. The newer version runs through ETFs, derivatives, and quantitative strategies. Traditional stock information came from research reports and earnings releases. The newer version flows through tweets, YouTubers, and chat groups. Traditional equity markets were supposed to be institutionally priced. The newer version, the piece argues, looks more retailized, with systematic strategies chasing momentum on the way up and down.
At the same time, Bitcoin is trying to become more like a stock: through ETFs, greater institutional ownership, and lower volatility, it is being absorbed into mainstream finance.
The commentary calls this an absurd crossing point.
For traders who left crypto for equities, the ending is that they never really escaped their “original family.” The same mechanics keep repeating: a grand story, crowded positioning, easily available leverage, and the belief that each person can get out before the others do.
The piece closes with a line posted by a Korean retail investor on a trading forum: “I want to go back to life before I started trading stocks. Give me my money back.”
The market, it says, does not issue refunds.