Everything in this book is distilled from SemiAnalysis, so the reader deserves to know how much this source can be trusted, and for what. We ran an independent event study: 27 parallel agents extracted every stance-bearing company mention from 311 articles (664 single-stock events across 119 tickers; 384 bullish / 168 bearish), then measured geometric excess returns vs. the SMH semiconductor ETF over 1M/1Y/3Y from publication date. Methodology: equal-weight by name with ticker clustering (to kill the soft look-ahead of winners being covered repeatedly), pre-IPO look-ahead removed (ARM/CRWV etc.), delistings settled at last price, and three adversarial audit rounds fixing eight methodological defects. One-line verdict: the narratives are remarkably right, but the stock picks carry no alpha — which makes this book's use of the source (mechanisms and bottlenecks, not tickers) exactly the right one.
Key Findings
Post-Coverage Drift at a Glance
Bars show mean excess return vs SMH after coverage (equal-weight by name). For bearish coverage, negative = the call was right.
Bullish Scorecard
Bullish scorecard (names covered ≥5 times; equal-weight by name, geometric excess vs SMH)
| Ticker | N | 1M | 1Y | 3Y |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| ARM | 5 | +0.7% | +54.3% | – |
| NVDA | 62 | -0.1% | +30.4% | +168.4% |
| GFS | 6 | +16.3% | +22.0% | -61.3% |
| META | 5 | +1.1% | +17.2% | -38.5% |
| AVGO | 20 | +2.2% | +15.9% | +76.9% |
| 000660.KS | 15 | +3.1% | +10.6% | +49.3% |
| MU | 11 | +8.7% | +8.7% | -30.9% |
| LRCX | 8 | +3.3% | +8.0% | -14.9% |
| 005930.KS | 5 | -4.9% | +2.4% | -58.0% |
| QCOM | 6 | +3.7% | +0.2% | -31.1% |
| TSM | 32 | +0.3% | -3.1% | -4.3% |
| AMD | 27 | -0.2% | -4.6% | -22.5% |
| GOOGL | 23 | +0.9% | -6.4% | -15.5% |
| AMAT | 10 | -3.3% | -8.0% | -16.4% |
| 2454.TW | 8 | +4.2% | -10.8% | -15.1% |
| ASML | 6 | -2.0% | -12.0% | -37.8% |
| MSFT | 9 | -2.7% | -17.7% | -53.0% |
| 8035.T | 6 | +0.2% | -18.8% | -38.6% |
| MRVL | 7 | -3.5% | -22.2% | -39.8% |
| INTC | 12 | -1.9% | -27.3% | -73.8% |
| 0981.HK | 6 | -4.7% | -31.8% | +11.1% |
| AMZN | 7 | -7.2% | -33.6% | -25.4% |
Click a column header to sort. Excess returns vs SMH, equal-weight by name, geometric, from publication date.
Bearish Scorecard
Bearish scorecard (covered ≥3 times; negative excess = the bearish call was right)
| Ticker | N | 1M | 1Y | 3Y |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| NVDA | 7 | +6.2% | +63.5% | +242.3% |
| MRVL | 3 | -11.9% | +34.0% | -30.8% |
| AVGO | 6 | -2.7% | +20.5% | +107.2% |
| AAPL | 3 | -0.5% | +12.5% | -19.7% |
| CRDO | 3 | -1.1% | +10.4% | +260.8% |
| LRCX | 3 | +9.0% | +1.2% | -3.1% |
| MU | 6 | -4.3% | +0.6% | +69.1% |
| 2454.TW | 4 | +3.5% | -4.7% | -22.0% |
| GOOGL | 3 | +6.4% | -8.2% | -6.0% |
| 005930.KS | 15 | -1.1% | -8.8% | -50.3% |
| TSM | 3 | -1.2% | -11.5% | +7.9% |
| QCOM | 5 | +0.5% | -16.1% | -42.8% |
| ASML | 4 | +0.6% | -19.4% | -35.0% |
| GFS | 3 | +12.0% | -21.9% | -76.8% |
| AMD | 8 | -4.0% | -23.1% | -36.7% |
| INTC | 30 | -0.5% | -24.5% | -61.7% |
| ARM | 6 | -7.1% | -53.5% | – |
Click a column header to sort. Excess returns vs SMH, equal-weight by name, geometric, from publication date.
How to Use the Source
How to use: treat SemiAnalysis as a microscope on mechanisms and bottlenecks, not a buy list. That is precisely what this book distills — chain structure, bottleneck propagation, cost economics — the parts of the source that verify best. For trading: only the ~1-month drift is usable (and thin), bearish calls deserve real weight, and at long horizons return to a portfolio/beta framework.
Methodology & Limits
Scope: events dated at publication; benchmark = SMH; corpus includes paid-article previews (79% of full text), stances extracted from available text. This is the author's independent analysis, unaffiliated with SemiAnalysis.
- Design. Classic analyst-coverage event study (Womack 1996 lineage): buy-and-hold geometric excess returns vs a sector benchmark (Barber & Lyon 1997), equal-weight by name with ticker clustering, pre-IPO look-ahead removed, delistings settled at last price.
- Fairness. SemiAnalysis explicitly states it does not provide investment advice, ratings, or price targets — scoring it as a stock-picker is my frame, not theirs. The audit measures information content, not their stated product.
- Limits, stated plainly. No calendar-time portfolio check (long-horizon t-stats are optimistic under overlapping windows; the 3Y direction is robust, its precision is not). The single positive result (1M spread, t=2.33) does not survive strict multiple-testing correction. Stance extraction is LLM-based on available text without a human-labeled validation sample. Benchmark is a cap-weighted sector ETF rather than characteristics-matched portfolios.