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Yes, I know this is WSB, and I’m a regard. But this is too crazy of a coincidence to ignore.
SK Hynix IPO tomorrow. \~$28B raise, biggest foreign listing in US history, second biggest IPO ever behind SpaceX last month. Demand reportedly running 7x the shares available.
For anyone who wasn't trading in 2000: AT&T Wireless priced April 26, 2000. $10.6B, biggest US IPO ever at the time. People remember it as "the IPO that popped the dot com bubble." It didn't. Nasdaq topped March 10. The IPO came six weeks AFTER the top. What it actually did was soak up the last of the marginal liquidity. Retail finally got their allocation, stock popped \~7% day one, then bled for two years until Cingular bought the carcass. The mega IPO didn't cause the crash, it confirmed the market had run out of new buyers. First chart shows this.
Why SKHY rhymes with it:
\- They're selling shares at the absolute peak of a memory cycle to fund capex (new fabs + EUV machines). Literally raising money to build the supply that ends the shortage. AT&T Wireless did the exact same thing with its 3G buildout
\- Korean shares up \~700% in 12 months, and already down 25% from the June peak before the ADRs even price
\- Samsung just reported slowing price increases and dropped 7%
\- SK Hynix's own comments about slowing AI memory investment gave the Kospi its 5th worst day EVER last month. That kind of single day volatility has historically only shown up in bear markets
\- trades around 7x 2026 earnings estimates, which sounds cheap until you remember these same companies had negative gross margins a few years ago. memory always looks cheapest on peak earnings, that's the trap. you buy cyclicals at high P/E and sell at low P/E, not the other way around
Why it's different from 2000: these companies actually print money, hynix is guiding to something like $144B net income this year. And honestly it's probably not any single deal that matters, it's the cumulative issuance. SpaceX $75B + SKHY $28B + whatever OpenAI/Anthropic do later. Hyperscaler capex is heading toward $1T/yr and cash flow can't fund it anymore, so everyone's tapping debt and equity markets at once. Same core problem as 2000: supply of paper growing faster than the marginal buyer's cash. Third chart.
To be clear I'm not calling the top. The honest lesson from 2000 is nobody knew AT&T Wireless marked it until way later. But I'll be watching SKHY's first couple weeks closely. Strong pricing, day one pop, then a slow fade while breadth narrows = that's the 2000 script. If it holds and memory names base out, probably another leg higher.
Charts attached. Data is actual Nasdaq daily closes for both periods. IPO sizes are nominal dollars, AWE's $10.6B is roughly $19-20B today, so SKHY is bigger in real terms but not 3x bigger, before anyone comes at me.
Not financial advice…