Andy Cheng is 26, unemployed and, with the help of a little borrowed money, the proud owner of $60,000 worth of Taiwanese tech stocks. And in many ways, he speaks for the entire island of 23 million people when he doles out the following advice: “Buy any stock and you will make money.”
AI mania has gripped any number of stock markets across the globe in recent months — South Korea, China, the US — but perhaps nowhere is at it as frenzied as here in Taiwan, the No. 1 producer of the chips that power the technology.
Teenagers are rushing to open brokerage accounts; spikes in trading volumes are crashing firms’ websites; and the Taiwanese market, up over 100% in the past year, is rallying so fast that in a matter of weeks it overtook the UK, Canada and India to become the world’s fifth largest.