One Stock Was Almost All of Thursday's Nikkei Fall. Tonight's Selloff Is the Broad One.
Thursday's Tokyo session was reported as an AI selloff and it was not one.
The Nikkei closed at 61,077.90, down 1,110.73 points or 1.79% — three readers agree on all three figures — while the Topix ROSE 1.16% to 3,940.39, with 1,127 Prime Market issues advancing against 408 declining. Toyota rose 16.68% and Nintendo 6.31%. One reader puts Advantest alone at about 1,097 of those 1,110.73 points: 98.8% of the fall from one stock. A second says three chip names together weighed about 1,800 points, which is 689 more than the index lost, so everything else added that back. Tonight was the opposite: Nasdaq −5.52% to 24,315.00, Nasdaq 100 −6.36%, Russell 2000 −4.45% — small caps do not fall 4.45% because three semis are de-rated. Against the 27,599.89 record close of 6 October the index is 11.90% lower, and nobody published that, because all three correction stories were filed before the close, at 24,796.06, 24,712.60 and about 25,500, with three different modal verbs; one of them fails its own arithmetic by 45bp. Dollar–yen round-tripped 158.43 to 157.82 in Tokyo, back to 158.50 in New York, then down to 157.54, closing 157.64 and 157.70 by 07:02 JST — 82 pips below the close we published yesterday and 96 to 101 below the three 200-day readings we gave. The live structure is the Ichimoku cloud, 157.18 to 158.44, not the moving average we wrote about twice. And on a single source, CME Nikkei futures settled 57,350 against a 61,077.90 cash close: a 6.10% gap into the open.