Here’s a fact that might shock you: the iShares MSCI South Korea ETF (NYSEARCA:EWY) has ripped 303.3% higher in U.S. dollar terms since the start of 2025, while the SPDR S&P 500 ETF (NYSEARCA:SPY) has gained 29.9% over the same stretch. That puts Korean stocks at roughly 10 times the U.S. return.
EWY shares traded near $205.52 midday Thursday, after climbing 4% on the session. SPY shares sit at $750.46, up 27% over one year, a strong number that looks pedestrian against the global leaderboard.
The figures come from a Charlie Bilello and Creative Planning chart shared on X showing 2025-2026 total returns in U.S. dollars. SPY and the broader U.S. market are on fire by any normal standard. They’re just global laggards right now, and that challenges the “U.S. exceptionalism” trade that has dominated allocations for years.
Memory Supercycle Powers the Korean Rally
EWY is concentrated in two names that have become indispensable to the AI buildout: Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix. The two stocks together comprise over half of the EWY portfolio and have achieved $1 trillion market capitalizations on the strength of high-bandwidth memory (HBM) chips used in AI servers.
The same secular force has lit up U.S. memory names. Micron Technology (NASDAQ:MU | MU Price Prediction) reported fiscal Q1 2026 revenue of $13.64 billion, up 57% year over year, with Cloud Memory Business Unit revenue nearly doubling to $5.28 billion at a 66% gross margin. CEO Sanjay Mehrotra declared, “Micron delivered record revenue and significant margin expansion at the company level and also in each of our business units.”
NVIDIA (NASDAQ:NVDA) just posted Q1 FY2027 revenue of $81.6 billion, up 85% year over year, with Data Center Networking revenue surging 199% to $14.8 billion. CEO Jensen Huang called the AI factory buildout “the largest infrastructure expansion in human history.” Every one of those AI factories needs Korean memory, and SK Hynix is NVIDIA’s leading HBM supplier.
Other Markets That Beat the U.S.
EWY and Korea are the standout, but they’re far from alone on the leaderboard. Peru returned 122.1%, Taiwan 106.4%, and Poland 103.9% over the same window, per Bilello’s dataset.
Austria added 101%, Greece 96.1%, Spain 90.8%, and Colombia 87.3%. SPY lands in the lower half of the global equity ETF list, a setup few U.S.-centric investors would have predicted at the beginning of 2025.
The macro backdrop matters here. JPMorgan noted that international equities are up 31% in U.S. dollar terms, outperforming U.S. equities by 1,520 basis points, the biggest outperformance since 1993, with multiple expansion and a weaker dollar doing much of the work alongside the memory boom.
What to Watch
The Korean trade hinges on three variables: the duration of the memory supercycle, the dollar, and geopolitics on the peninsula. Micron’s order book reportedly stretches into 2027, and NVIDIA has secured $119 billion in supply-related commitments. Both signals are supportive of sustained HBM demand into next year.
However, the concentration risk is real. Samsung and SK Hynix make up roughly 45% of EWY holdings, and EWY shares sold off sharply during the March Iran conflict before snapping back on the ceasefire. Prudent investors weighing international exposure may want to size their positions with that volatility in mind.
The structural takeaway for SPY/S&P 500 holders is that U.S. exceptionalism hasn’t been in effect for 17 months, and the global breadth of leadership suggests that diversification has finally paid off in a meaningful way. Watch for whether memory pricing holds into the second half and whether the dollar resumes its slide, both of which could extend the gap further.
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