Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company Ltd., headquartered in Hsinchu, Taiwan, was founded in 1987 and pioneered the pure-play foundry or 'merchant fab' model. The company serves both integrated semiconductor producers who outsource a portion of their production as well as 'fabless' semiconductor producers who outsource all manufacturing. Taiwan Semi serves over 500 semiconductor customers, producing more than 11,500 distinct products while providing a broad range of advanced, specialty, and advanced packaging technologies.

Netherlands-based ASML Holdings N.V. provides advanced semiconductor capital equipment solutions. ASML manufactures ultraviolet lithography systems critical to the production of integrated circuits. The company, based in Europe's top technology hub near Eindhoven, has operations in Europe, the Americas, and Asia, and employs 33,000 people. The company supplies both primary semiconductor companies such as Intel and Samsung as well as merchant foundry companies such as Taiwan Semiconductor. Together with its partners, ASML is driving the development of more affordable, more powerful, and more energy-efficient chips and devices.

The 'V' bottoms are complete for the S&P 500, Nasdaq, and Nasdaq 100 -- and in just 11 days, the majors indices are back in all-time high territory. Like the Artemis 2 launch, which took off around the same time as the stock market, it's been straight to the moon for stocks. So far, the only difference is the spacecraft reached the moon and turned around, while stocks just keep flying higher. In 11 days, the S&P 500 has surged 10.7%, the Nasdaq 15.5%, and the QQQ 14%. That's the largest 11-day burst for the three indices since March 2022, which happened to be the first counter-trend rally of the 2022 bear market. Before that, it's the biggest gain since the world was coming out of the pandemic. And before that is March 2009, the start of the bull market after the financial crisis. Mega-cap Information Technology has brought the market back from the abyss, with the XLK spiking 18% over 11 days. Semiconductors led, with the SMH soaring 25%, the biggest pop since the October 2002 tech meltdown. After IT, Consumer Discretionary has jumped 12%, Industrials 9%, and Real Estate 8%. Sentiment has reversed sharply, with the five-day CBOE equity-only put/call ratio dropping to 0.51 from 0.78 on March 20, one of the lowest readings in the past four years. A few of these low readings led to minor pullbacks, and a few led to major pullbacks. The ISE equity call/put ratio has jumped from a neutral 1.47 to a fairly-bullish extreme of 2.80 in the 10 days ending April 14. That's the highest reading since January 2026. So the chances for a pullback are rising.

ASML is the leader in lithography systems for manufacturing semiconductors with 90% market share. Lithography is the process in which a light source is used to expose circuit patterns from a photo mask onto a semiconductor wafer. Lithography allows chipmakers to increase the number of transistors on the same area of silicon, with lithography historically representing a high portion of the cost of making cutting-edge chips. ASML outsources the manufacturing of most of its parts, acting like an assembler. ASML’s largest clients are TSMC, Samsung, Intel, SK Hynix, and Micron.