PremiumThe Great AI Handoff: Hedge Funds Dump AI At Record Pace As Retail Pours Record $7 Billion Into 3x Semis ETF
Last week someone sold a record amount of AI stock, and someone else bought it with 3x leverage.
The sellers are easy to identify. According to Goldman's Prime brokerage, hedge funds net sold global AI stocks for five straight sessions through Oct 14, and "all of the cumulative net buying in this group since the start of 2025 by hedge funds has now been reversed." That is almost two years of accumulation erased in a week. The buyers took a little longer to show up in the data, but they did: nearly $10 billion poured into levered ETFs, the largest weekly inflow in Goldman's dataset, and a record $7 billion of it went into SOXL, the triple-levered semiconductor ETF, during the very week semis had their longest losing streak since 2006.