Asian Hedge Funds Hit Hard in AI Selloff, Aspex Drops 16% in Single Month
nashnova research
The AI stock rout has hammered Asian hedge funds — Hong Kong's Aspex lost 16% last month and Goldman data shows Asian long-only managers fell 9.4% on average. This is not a valuation debate; it is a crowded-leverage stampede.
How much did Asian hedge funds actually lose?
Hong Kong's Aspex fell 16% last month; Valliance's long-short flagship dropped 6.7%.
Goldman Sachs prime brokerage data: Asian equity long-only managers lost 9.4% on average, compressing year-to-date returns to 14%.
China-focused funds fell 11% in October, narrowing YTD gains to 16%. Long-only quant strategies lost over 10%, wiping out the entire year's profit.
This means → one month of selling swallowed most of the year's gains — a clear sign that positions were crowded into the same handful of AI and tech names.
What happened in the market on those days?
The MSCI Asia-Pacific index fell as much as 5.3% intraday on November 6. South Korea's KOSPI dropped 8.8%, triggering a circuit breaker — an automatic trading halt designed to cool a free-fall.
The day before, the Nasdaq 100 shed over $2.3 trillion in market cap in a single session.
In plain terms = U.S. AI leaders cratered first; Asian markets followed the next morning, falling hard enough to trip South Korea's emergency brake.
Why were high-net-worth clients hit too?
From Taiwan to Hong Kong, wealthy clients on leveraged positions — bets funded with borrowed money — received margin calls.
Some Hong Kong clients held structured notes tied to stocks and were forced to take physical delivery at a loss. In plain terms = when the product matured, they had to buy the underlying shares at a pre-set price — even though the stock had already fallen well below it.
A Hong Kong broker said retail investors flooded in overnight for advice. The only guidance: "get out as fast as you can" and cut leverage. The broker noted, however, that having demanded extra collateral on tech-leveraged positions weeks earlier helped reduce forced-liquidation risk.
Why was the stampede so violent?
Eagle's View Capital fund manager Chris McGuire called it "one of the most extreme moves since the dot-com bubble."
Holders concentrated in the same stocks unwound at the same time, creating rare one-way momentum. This means → everyone owned the same AI names, and when they sold, they sold together — amplifying the cascade many times over.
Independent analyst Travis Lundy argued the drop "looks more like a position blow-up than a fundamental rethink" — October losses triggered an early-November liquidation wave that fed on itself.
What is the core question now?
T&D Asset Management chief strategist Hiroshi Namioka said "investors genuinely struggle to see upside" — the market mood borders on irrational.
One driver: expectations that a Democratic sweep in Congress would push stricter AI regulation and slow data-center buildouts.
This reflects a shift in the central question — it is no longer whether AI valuations need a reset but how far the deleveraging still has to run. Put simply = the market's biggest fear is no longer "Is AI worth the price?" but "How many forced sellers are still out there?"
市场有风险，内容仅供研究参考，不构成投资建议。