Direxion Daily Semiconductors Bull 3x Shares (SOXL) plummeted 14.87% during intraday trading on Friday, as the triple-leveraged exchange-traded fund mirrored and amplified a severe downturn across the global semiconductor sector.

The sharp decline was driven by a confluence of factors pressuring chip stocks worldwide. South Korea's Financial Services Commission announced tighter regulations for chip leveraged ETFs, raising the minimum deposit requirement significantly and restricting collateral to cash only, which triggered forced deleveraging. Concurrently, a Bank of America fund manager survey revealed that a vast majority of respondents identified long semiconductor positions as the market's most crowded trade, raising concerns of an unwind.

These developments intensified a sector-wide liquidation wave, with storage and memory stocks like SK Hynix and SanDisk bearing the brunt of the selling pressure. As a product designed to deliver three times the daily return of the Philadelphia Semiconductor Index, SOXL's structure magnified the underlying sector's losses, leading to the steep intraday decline as hedge funds continued to net sell chip hardware stocks for consecutive weeks.