"Selling America" wave rises again as global funds flock to two main themes: Asian technology stocks and gold.

The global emerging market stocks, with a focus on Asian emerging stock markets, as well as international precious metal assets such as sovereign currencies, gold, and silver, have continued their strong upward trend since the end of 2025 and the beginning of 2026. As tensions between the United States and multiple sovereign governments, including traditional European allies, continue to put significant selling pressure on dollar-denominated assets, a new wave of "selling America" has thoroughly activated diversified fund flows globally and reignited the trend of global diversified asset allocation. The investment craze surrounding Asian emerging stock markets, focusing on the stock markets of South Korea, China A-shares, Hong Kong stocks, Taiwan stocks, and the Indian stock market, has attracted global funds in droves. Precious metal assets such as gold and silver are actively following this trend of diversified fund flows. During the Asian trading session on Friday, as the emerging Asian stock markets accelerated their rise, especially the tech stocks leading the South Korean and Hong Kong stock markets and A-shares in China, an MSCI benchmark stock index measuring the Asian emerging stock markets continued to reach historic highs following several days of strong gains, climbing to another all-time high on Friday and closing at a record high. Meanwhile, the MSCI Emerging Markets Index, measuring global emerging markets, also headed towards historic highs under the leadership of the Asian emerging stock markets. Investors are injecting cash into emerging market stock funds at a record pace, leading to consecutive all-time highs for the MSCI Emerging Markets Index, while Asian sovereign currencies and sovereign bonds have also seen recent inflows of funds. The latest market dynamics show that the People's Bank of China has set the daily central parity rate of the renminbi at a strong level exceeding 7 yuan to the US dollar for the first time in over two years, pushing the overall upward trend of sovereign currencies in Asian emerging markets. Amid the wave of "de-dollarization," currency devaluation crises, escalating geopolitical tensions, and continued inflow of safe-haven funds, the price of gold has surged to near the epic level of $5000/ounce. As Greenland faces a sovereignty crisis, Japanese government long-term bond prices experience a major collapse, the Federal Reserve's monetary policy independence is threatened by Trump, and sovereign currencies are facing a devaluation crisis due to debt pressure, gold, one of the precious metals, is continuing its record-setting price surge. After a skyrocketing increase of 70% in gold spot/futures prices in 2025, gold has continued its upward trajectory in early 2026. Ray Dalio, the founder of the world's largest hedge fund, Bridgewater Associates, believes that the current global monetary order centered around the US dollar is collapsing, as major central banks no longer consider fiat currencies as reliable wealth stores but are instead increasing their gold holdings. This reflects a shift from fiat currencies to hard assets in the backdrop of global trade and capital wars, the surge in US sovereign debt, and resurfacing global geopolitical mistrust. Asian emerging stock markets are on fire! A-shares and the South Korean stock market soar in 2026 Investors are pouring funds into Asian emerging stock market funds at an unprecedented rate, as the trend of capital outflow from US assets continues to gain momentum. The MSCI Asia Emerging Stock Market and MSCI Emerging Markets Index both hit historic highs on Friday, with the MSCI Latin America Stock Index reaching its highest level since April 2018. Government bonds in some Latin American countries, long shunned by Wall Street, also hit new highs. The dispute over Greenland reignites doubts in the financial markets about "American exceptionalism" and "dollar hegemony". Investors believe that US assets are no longer the safest and most reliable long-term investment, prompting funds from Europe to India to diversify their portfolios and reduce their long-term dependence on US assets, particularly planning to significantly reduce investments in US Treasury assets. Undoubtedly, the rising trend of diversified fund flows globally has provided strong momentum for the strong rebound of Asian emerging stock and bond assets since the beginning of 2026. This rebound is supported by the resilient global economic growth momentum, the global surge in AI expenditures, political changes in the Latin American region, and the return to orthodox fiscal and monetary policies in many developing countries. Asian emerging stock markets are undoubtedly the core beneficiaries of the global trend towards diversified asset allocation. With the ongoing impact of US tariff policies and the consensus in the market that "long-term dollar depreciation" and "American exceptionalism will gradually collapse," the flow of global funds is shifting from single dollar assets to diversified assets globally. In this context, Asian emerging equity assets with the triple attributes of "high growth, low correlation, and low valuation," especially Asian tech growth stocks around the "high growth" attribute, are attracting global funds. Whether it is TSMC, a unique leader in advanced semiconductor technology, or global memory chip giants Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix, or Chinese chip manufacturers benefiting from the trend of "local substitution," such as Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation and Chinese semiconductor equipment giants, these are all essential stock targets for investors to seize unprecedented opportunities in the AI technology wave and the semiconductor supercycle. The South Korean stock market is undoubtedly the most eye-catching market in the global stock markets in 2026. The incredibly hot global sentiment towards memory chips propelled the benchmark stock index of the South Korean market - the Kospi Composite Index - to skyrocket by 76% in 2025, making it the wildest stock market of 2025, mainly due to the crazy growth of two major weight stocks, SK Hynix and Samsung Electronics, which together accounted for more than 30% of the gains. On January 22, 2026, the Kospi Composite Index even briefly surpassed the epic threshold of 5000 points and set a new all-time high, also benefiting from the strong upward trend of the two weight stocks and storage chip giants SK Hynix and Samsung Electronics since the beginning of the year. On Friday, the Kospi Composite Index continued to hit new highs, with an increase of nearly 20% since the beginning of the year. The performance of the Taiwanese stock market and the A-share market in China since 2026 has also been incredibly strong. With the strong rise of the super weight stock TSMC, the benchmark Taiwan Weighted Index has repeatedly refreshed record highs, breaking through the 30,000-point mark in early 2026 and continuously setting new highs. Wall Street giant Goldman Sachs reiterated its "conviction buy" rating for TSMC and raised its target price twice since January, with the latest target price reaching NT$2,600. At the close on Friday, TSMC's stock price was at NT$1,770. AI GPUs in high demand since 2023, as well as the skyrocketing demand for AI ASICs, all rely on TSMC. TSMC is currently the world's largest contract chip manufacturer, and as the frenzy over AI continues to sweep the globe with no signs of cooling down and continues to benefit global chip giants such as NVIDIA, AMD, and Broadcom who are profiting from the surge in demand for AI chips, the chip giant's chip manufacturing contract scale has surged, driving TSMC's performance to continue to exceed expectations since last year and providing a strong logical support for the recent record highs in TSMC's Taiwan and US ADR stock prices. The A-share market in China has also shown strong upward momentum, with the Shanghai Composite Index still near its highest level since the end of July 2015 at the close on Friday, having set a record for the longest consecutive positive days a few days earlier, with an increase of up to 5% since the beginning of 2026; and the ChiNext Index has gained nearly 5% since the beginning of 2026. The strong rise in A-shares is mainly due to the continued optimistic sentiment towards China's progress in AI applications under the leadership of DeepSeek, as well as the strong upward trend of China's AI computing industry chain under the trend of "local substitution". With the continued explosive growth in global demand for AI computing infrastructure and the "local substitution" trend under the backdrop of the China-US rivalry, several leaders in the AI computing industry chain and chip design, as well as semiconductor equipment, in the A-share market have surged and set historic highs, with their performance increasing as well. Oliver Harvey, a senior strategist at Deutsche Bank in London, wrote in a report, "Emerging market assets are the main beneficiaries of accelerated global economic growth. When growth opportunities in developed markets are limited or encounter significant negative logic, the prospects for emerging markets will be even more bullish." Strategists from Citi, Roheet Garg and Gordon Gao, stated in a report, "The trend of de-dollarization and the US government's fiscal profligacy theme are back. De-dollarization and fiscal deficit expansion are likely to positively affect the risk premiums of emerging markets, particularly Asian tech stocks, just like in 2025." "Quietly exiting" US assets Katie Koch, CEO of TCW Group, said in an interview on Friday, "People are trying to diversify their investments to stay away from US assets, I would describe it as a 'quiet exit' from the long-favored US sovereign debt assets. I don't think some sell-off behaviors will be publicly announced; I believe they will continue to look for opportunities for diversified investments." Long-term weak Latin American sovereign currencies such as the Brazilian real, Colombian peso, and Chilean peso have risen by more than 3% this year. Meanwhile, the National Bank of Poland, one of the world's largest gold purchasers, approved a major plan to purchase an additional 150 tons of gold, which is significant good news for the gold price that has been hitting record highs. Similar to the logic of the surging Asian emerging stock markets, gold is also one of the biggest beneficiaries of the global trend of diversified asset allocation. The latest statistics show that the iShares Core MSCI Emerging Markets ETF (investing in global emerging market stocks, with a focus on Chinese and South Korean stock markets) with a market value of $135 billion attracted nearly $6 billion in large net inflows in January, potentially setting a record for the largest monthly net inflows since the launch of the ETF fund in 2012.