Is Asia's AI Boom Creating the Next Investment Bubble?
episodePreviously titled “How to Invest in Asia as the AI Trade Gets More Volatile” — renamed by the publisher on Aug 3, 2026
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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Welcome to Merrin Talks Money, the podcast in which people who know the markets explain the markets. I am Merrin Semsep-Webb, and this week I'm speaking with Fiona Yang, a fund manager at Invesco. She is the manager of the Invesco Asia Dragon Investment Trust. On today's show, we talk about AI, we talk about Korea, volatile market, very AI exposed. We talk about India, cheap or not cheap, and why has it lost so much popularity? And And we talk for probably the first time on the show about the Australian stock market. Fiona, welcome to Merrin Talks Money. Thank you for having me here again. You were in earlier this year, and my goodness, a lot has happened since. And at the time, we talked about all sorts of things, but one of the big topics that we discussed last time, and by the way, listeners, if you haven't listened to the last one, maybe go listen to that one either before or after this one.
It's had lots of interesting stuff in it. I wanted to start by talking about what's happened in Korea, because it was already growing great guns the last time we talked. It continued to soar and soar and soar based on a couple of major AI-related stocks. And then we had a little bit of a stumble. And now Korea is, I was going to say, 25% off its peak in June. But on the day that we're talking, I think the KOSPI went up 7%, 8% even yesterday. So this is very volatile stuff. And we're also hearing about a lot of very highly leveraged, ordinary Korean investors or gamblers, I guess we should say, who lost an awful lot of money by having very high margin debt and then being hit by falling share prices.
So Korea is fascinating because it's exactly, as you said, that front row seat to AI, but it's also turned out to be very volatile.
Yeah, exactly. That's a fantastic observation that you had there on the Korean market. I think if we take a step back, quite a few things have worked out very favorably for Korea over the past 12, 18 months. The memory cycle boosted by AI demand is just phenomenal. This is one of the biggest super cycles that we have seen for stocks like Samsung Electronics and Essex Hynix. And on top of that, I think we have to say the Korean government has done a fantastic job in boosting shareholder return, doing the value up initiative in Korea. It's a textbook sort of example that all the other countries should really look up to for some of the holdings that we have in the portfolio, especially the financials.
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Chapters
4 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:00–9:58
2
What are the episode’s focus and who is the guest?
9:58–14:06
3
Why did Korea’s AI-driven rally become so volatile and concentrated?
14:06–36:37
4
How did underinvestment create a memory supercycle and how long might it last?
36:37–40:10
Speakers
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