Essay: Using X Model's Data on Buying TSMC to Predict the Turning Point of a Semiconductor Correction

Either the bottom is right in front (within two weeks), or it’s still a month or two away. The middle period has not occurred even once in five years.

This gap was not cut by adjusting samples. If you only look at statistics from the last three years, the pattern is the same. If you change the observation window from 60 to 45 or 90 days, the gap remains. Among 8 comparable cycles on the Philadelphia Semiconductor Index, the distribution is also bi-modal, with nothing in the middle.

Another point: after Tier 1 entry, how much further does the index usually fall?

In the shallowest cycles, the bottom was reached after less than a 3% additional drop.

The deepest cycle, entered in February 2025 and caught the tariff war in April; after Tier 1, QQQ dropped another 21.7%.

To clarify: I did not exclude any cycles from the sample. The 2022 bear market is included, as is the 2025 tariff war. For a grid-based pullback model, panic is not an outlier to be excluded—only twice in five years did the model fill all four tiers, precisely during those two times. Panic is this model’s home field.

This also returns to the reason I use TSMC as a reference. Its low volatility means how many tiers are triggered itself reads the current market pressure: Tier 1 means a shallow pullback; Tier 4, systemic panic. In the two times all four tiers were filled, the bottom was 10 and 30 days away, respectively; for the nine times where only Tier 1-2 were filled, the median was 8 days. The deeper the entry, the further the bottom—though with only two cases of all tiers filled, this is merely directional guidance.

But this means one thing: if in the current cycle the next tiers are successively triggered, it doesn’t mean the bottom is near, but that this correction is deeper than what we currently see.

Regarding the next steps of my model:

Returning to the current cycle—July 16th, Tier 1 entry. According to the distribution of the 11 cycles, two paths lie ahead: the bottom is in the next few days, or it’s another month or two away. The middle path has not occurred in history.

Which one will it be? I don’t know, and neither does the model.

This signal indicates that risk has entered a climax, so there’s no need to guess whether this is just an adjustment or a simple pullback. The next three tiers are pending—if the market rises there’s an exit, if it falls there’s more room to buy in. This is what I meant by fully pre-planned trading actions.

How deep this cycle goes, when the index bottoms, which interval it lands in—if TSMC is sold, I will publish it in real time in my independent site’s “Trading Archive” module.I will record each tier as it happens.