The short version
- Shorting chip stocks has paid off for a Hyperliquid whale: its $132.9 million of shorts on US tech and chip stocks are up about $25.7 million after Thursday’s rout.
- Its account gained $13.5 million in a day; the biggest winners are Sandisk (+$6.5 million) and Intel (+$4.0 million), from a wallet that was $5.6 million down in late September.
- Next: the US jobs report at 13:30 UTC (8:30 a.m. in New York) today. Follow Base Camp on X to see the whale’s next move first.
Thursday’s stock rout had at least one winner, and it sits on Hyperliquid. Shorting chip stocks and the rest of the AI trade has left one whale with $132.9 million of short bets, up about $25.7 million at the time of writing.
Three things changed in the last 24 hours:
1. Memory and chip stocks fell hardest: Sandisk lost 22% on Nasdaq, Micron 17% and the 3x chip fund SOXL 39%. 2. The wallet’s account grew by $13.5 million in a single day, per Hyperliquid’s own portfolio data. 3. Lookonchain flagged the Hyperliquid whale overnight, counting “over $30M” in profit.
The whale, heavily shorting U.S. stocks, especially AI, semiconductor, and memory chip stocks, is now in profit on most positions, with over $30M in total unrealized profit!
+$6.36M on $SNDK
+$4.03M on $INTC
+$2.33M on $SOXL
+$2.25M on $MU
…
hypurrscan.io/address/0x0242…
Which Chip Stocks Is the Whale Shorting?
Mostly the AI trade. Wallet 0x0242 trades Hyperliquid stocks through trade.xyz, the stock perps market that runs on the exchange, and holds 34 shorts against seven small longs worth $4.5 million. A perp, short for perpetual future, lets you bet on a price falling without owning the stock.
The biggest shorts, by size and open profit:
- Alphabet: $18.5 million, up $1.4 million
- Sandisk: $17.1 million, up $6.5 million
- Micron: $13.5 million, up $2.3 million
- SpaceX: $11.4 million, up $1.4 million
- SK Hynix: $10.6 million, up $1.3 million
- Intel: $10.4 million, up $4.0 million
- SOXL: $5.1 million, up $2.3 million
Meta, Nvidia, Circle, Marvell, Nebius and a Korean 3x fund fill out the rest. Each leg is set to 10x leverage, but the account as a whole runs at about 2.9x: $137.4 million of positions on $47.7 million of equity.
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How Did Shorting Chip Stocks Turn a Losing Wallet Into a $30M Winner?
By surviving the summer. The account opened on June 24 with a $100 test deposit and took in $17.0 million over 18 deposits until September 30. For most of that time it lost money: around September 23 it was $5.6 million down.
Then the AI stocks rolled over. Hyperliquid puts the wallet’s all-time profit at $30.7 million today, $24.7 million of it made in the past week, on $2.52 billion of total volume. That fits Lookonchain’s “over $30 million” better than the open positions alone do.
The timing could hardly have been better. Since October 28 Intel has fallen 45%, Sandisk 43% and Micron 33% on Nasdaq. Thursday was the worst of it:
INTEL: 🚨 $3 TRILLION VANISHED FROM US STOCKS IN ONE SESSION
AI and chip stocks cratered the day after the midterms.
> Nasdaq 100: -6.3%
> S&P 500: -4.3%
AI giants:
> $NVDA -9.0%
> $MSFT -3.5%
> $GOOGL -2.3%
Data centers got hit hardest:
> $IREN -16.0%
> $NBIS -15.1%
> $CIFR
SIDE TRAIL: Anthropic IPO: A Hyperliquid Whale Bets $25.6M Against the Listing
Sandisk Price: How Far Can the Short Run?
The largest winner shows where shorting chip stocks stands now. Sandisk trades at $853 on Hyperliquid, 27% under the whale’s average short at $1,175.66 and far below the 50-day moving average at $1,475 and the 200-day at $1,550. The 50-day crossed under the 200-day on October 31, a death cross that trend traders read as a downtrend confirmed.
The risk sits elsewhere. The big shorts in Sandisk, Micron and Alphabet are on cross margin, with liquidation prices two to three times today’s levels. But 20 legs are isolated, and those die alone, Intel’s $10.4 million short among them. It is liquidated at $64.71, 20% above the price now. SOXL’s at $53.44, 19% above. After a 39% one-day drop, a 20% bounce in a 3x chip fund is not exotic.
TRAIL MAP: Futures and Leverage Explained: Perps, Margin and How Liquidation Really Works
So the whale does not need chips to keep falling. It needs them not to bounce 20% before it trims, and with $30.7 million of profit on the account, trimming is the cheaper mistake.
TANG has been trading crypto since 2017. The focus is technicals, DeFi and onchain data. On the chart, that means high-timeframe support, moving averages and momentum divergences. Onchain, it means regular checkups on where the data puts the cycle. TANG once ran CryptoJungle, a free community for researching and trading together, and brings that same spirit to Base Camp as one of its co-founders.
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