Global banks are restricting hedge fund leverage on leading Asian chipmakers
after strong year-to-date rallies raised pullback risk. Brokers including
Citigroup, JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs have raised financing costs on swap-based
longs in SK Hynix and Samsung Electronics, tightened new-trade sizes and which
names they will trade, and in some cases are refusing new swap requests or
assessing them case-by-case. Banks have applied similar limits to TSMC.