Here's what happened after 17 other one-day plunges in semiconductor stocks over the last 15 years

By Steve Goldstein

Tom Lee of Fundstrat says the pullback in chip stocks is a buying opportunity

Semiconductor stocks have seen one-day slumps before, and usually they have become buying opportunities, a noted strategist says.

Microchip stocks tumbled on Tuesday, but a look at similar one-day downturns in the semiconductor sector shows the declines are often fleeting.

Tom Lee, the usually bullish head of research at Fundstrat, found 17 other examples of semiconductor stocks falling at least 6% in a single session since 2011, after the VanEck Semiconductor ETF SMH fell 7% on Monday. That exchange-traded fund is still up 73% this year, driven by the price hikes that producers of memory chips and other semiconductors have been able to pass along to companies building out artificial-intelligence applications.

In the previous 17 episodes, Lee said, the median one-month gain for the stocks was 12%, with wins 88% of the time. The median three-month gain was 23%, also with an 88% win rate, and the median six-month gain was 39%, with a 94% win rate.

"In other words, these pullbacks arguably are buyable," said Lee.

The only time the pullbacks were not buyable was a period in 2024 through early 2025, but that was when visibility into AI spending didn't compare with today's, Lee said.

Extending his analysis to the broader market, he said that there are too many "top callers" - in other words, people saying the market has peaked - which to his mind is a contrarian positive signal.

Lee also made a valuation argument, pointing out the price-to-equity ratio for next year on the S&P 500 SPX is one percentage point lower than it was at the start of the year.

"We believe 2026 was a year of 'E' but now there is a case for 'P/E' to expand," he said. "Thus, we remain constructive near-term."

The markets

U.S. stock-index futures (ES00) (NQ00) were mostly higher after the 1.4% slump in the S&P 500 on Tuesday. Oil futures (CL00) fell to their lowest level since the U.S. and Israel launched their attack against Iran on Feb. 28. The euro (EURUSD) fell to a fresh one-year low vs. the U.S. dollar.

 
Key asset performance                                                Last       5d      1m       YTD     1y 
S&P 500                                                              7365.46    -1.94%  -2.04%   7.60%   20.90% 
Nasdaq Composite                                                     25,587.04  -2.99%  -4.01%   10.09%  28.50% 
10-year Treasury                                                     4.482      -1.80   -0.60    31.00   19.00 
Gold                                                                 4093.3     -4.28%  -8.12%   -5.51%  22.31% 
Oil                                                                  71.75      -4.35%  -19.75%  24.98%  10.50% 
Data: MarketWatch. Treasury yields change expressed in basis points 

The buzz

Micron Technology (MU) is forecast to report a near-quadrupling of revenue after the close, though whether it can live up to expectations after a 269% share-price gain this year remains to be seen. Rival memory-chip maker SK Hynix (KR:000660) announced it plans to list about $30 billion in American depository receipts next month.

FedEx (FDX) late Monday reported better-than-forecast results that nonetheless disappointed investors after a 36% stock-price rally this year.

Cerebras Systems shares (CBRS) were due to skid after the AI chip maker's first results as a public company.

Google parent Alphabet (GOOGL) will join the Dow Jones Industrial Average, replacing Verizon Communications (VZ), S&P Dow Jones Indices announced.

Another Dow component, Nike (NKE), named Pfizer CFO David Denton to the same role at the athletic-gear maker. Nike also said its fourth-quarter results will be "generally in line" with previous guidance, excluding a positive benefit from tariff refunds. Pfizer, for its part, had previously said Denton was going to leave.

New-home sales and leading economic indicators for May are due at 10 a.m. Results from the Treasury's auction of $70 billion worth of 5-year notes are due at 1 p.m. See the MarketWatch economic calendar.

The head of the International Atomic Energy Agency said inspectors will visit enrichment sites in Iran.

Billionaire Adani met with Trump Jr. while facing U.S. bribery charges.

The chart

Harvard economist Rebecca Diamond dug into the "Understanding America Study" maintained by the University of Southern California - a nationally representative panel of 15,000 U.S. residents - to study the impact of GLP-1 medications popularized by the likes of Eli Lilly and Novo Nordisk. She found that women who started GLP-1 drugs saw a 29-percentage-point increase in their marriage and cohabitation rate, compared with women who said they would like to start the drugs but have not. A similarly sized 27-point improvement was seen for women's employment among those who were previously not employed.

Top tickers

These were the most active stock-market tickers on MarketWatch as of 5 a.m. Eastern.

 
Ticker  Security name 
SPCX    Space Exploration Technologies Corp. 
MU      Micron Technology 
NVDA    Nvidia 
TSLA    Tesla 
TSM     Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. 
AMD     Advanced Micro Devices 
GME     GameStop 
MSFT    Microsoft 
INFY    Infosys 
INTC    Intel 

The woman who emptied a Knicks trash can on the street and stole it gets fired from her executive job at JPMorgan Chase.

-Steve Goldstein

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06-24-26 0721ET