Ten thousand dollars in Direxion Daily Semiconductor Bull 3X Shares (NYSEARCA:SOXL) on May 27, 2025 was worth about $131,000 thirteen months later, and almost nobody you know actually held it the whole way. That is the punchline and the problem. The fund closed at $225.79 on May 26, 2026 against a $17.24 starting price on May 27, 2025, a 1,209.99% gain on the exact one-year window the headlines have been quoting. The year-to-date number is nearly as large. SOXL opened 2026 at $47.24 and is up 377.96% through May 26. Most of that happened in a few violent stretches, including a single trading day on May 26 worth 18.49% and a week of 48.65% that came after months of pain.
If you owned this for the run, you are a hero in your group chat. If you sold in March, which a lot of people did, you watched the screenshot economy from the outside. The interesting question is what produced it and whether any of those conditions still hold.
The Arithmetic, Honestly
SOXL is a 3x daily leveraged ETF tracking the ICE Semiconductor Index, the same basket the unleveraged iShares Semiconductor ETF (NASDAQ:SOXX) tracks. So the cleanest sanity check is the head-to-head. SOXX returned 174.11% over the identical May 27, 2025 to May 26, 2026 window. Three times 174 is 522, not 1,210. The gap, ~688 percentage points, is where the story actually lives. That delta reflects the compounding of daily 3x exposure inside a particular kind of price action, and when the price action stops cooperating it works in the other direction with the same enthusiasm.
$10,000 in SOXL on May 27, 2025 became roughly $131,000. The same $10,000 in SOXX became about $27,400. Both are exceptional. Only one of them is the kind of number that makes someone quit their job, and only one of them could just as easily have been $2,000 if the path looked different.
Why The Leverage Worked This Time
Three things had to happen at once for this run to land the way it did, and all three did. The first is the obvious one. Semiconductor demand kept ratcheting up on AI capex. NVIDIA (NASDAQ:NVDA) has been telling investors AI capex will grow 3x to 4x by the end of the decade, and the hyperscaler order books kept validating it through 2025 and into 2026. Earnings out of the largest weights inside SOXL’s basket kept beating and kept guiding higher. That is the SOXX story. It is a real story.
The second is volatility, which is the whole reason a leveraged fund can produce a number like 1,210% off an underlying that did 174%. The VIX averaged 18.18 over the last twelve months and sits at 16.59 today, the 34.6th percentile of recent readings. Leveraged ETFs hate chop and love sustained directional moves through low volatility. Most of this twelve-month window was the second thing. There was one violent disruption, a VIX peak of 31.05 on March 27, 2026 with elevated readings from early March through April 7, which is where the bleed happened and where a lot of holders capitulated. The seven weeks since have been the cleanest possible setup for 3x daily exposure, with a steady decline from 25.78 on April 7 down to 16.59 as semis ripped on the other side.
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The third thing is that the bounce off the March low was enormous in percentage terms because the base was so low. SOXL was at $128.32 on April 24 and at $225.79 on May 26, a 75.96% one-month move. The Moomoo community noted that SOXL’s April monthly gain of about 165% was the best single month since inception, helped along by a 38% April for the PHLX Semiconductor Index, a level not seen since February 2000. A 3x fund recovering off a deep drawdown will generate outsized percentage numbers on the way back without ever reclaiming its old high in dollar terms. $100 invested in SOXL 15 years ago is now worth about $22,838, an average annual return of 44.22%, and you can fit several round-trips of total devastation inside that path.
Who The Fool Actually Was
Almost everyone, briefly. Reddit sentiment flipped from a score of 18 (very bearish) on the morning of May 8 to 88 (very bullish) by that evening, the same week as the biggest activity spike in the dataset, with 588 upvotes and 90 comments in a single wallstreetbets window on May 8 at 6pm ET. A widely circulated bearish post titled “Jr. Burry SOXL short” went up the same week the fund proceeded to do what it did. One Moomoo user, quoted in news aggregations, posted “I keep selling… but it keep going up! 😢 am I too early?”, which is the entire retail experience of this rally in one sentence.
Options markets tell a similar story. Open interest sat in the 1.0M to 1.2M contract range through April and May, with put-heavy days at 65.77% puts on May 15 and 59.75% puts on May 12. People were hedging or shorting into the move, and the move kept going.
What Has To Stay True For This To Continue
The forward look here is a checklist. For SOXL to keep working the way it has worked, three things need to remain in place, and you can watch all three on a phone.
First, the AI capex cycle has to keep absorbing the supply. The simplest tell is hyperscaler guided capex on quarterly calls and data-center revenue trajectory across the basket’s top holdings. Jim Cramer’s May 26, 2026 show flagged Micron as the day’s notable spike and asked whether NVIDIA has become a compounder, which is the right question and the wrong moment to assume the answer is yes forever.
Second, the volatility regime has to stay tame. With the VIX at 16.59 and trending lower, the math is working for leverage today. Any sustained move back above the low 20s, the kind of regime that ran from early March through early April, and the same daily compounding that produced 1,210% starts subtracting from your account on flat weeks. Watch the VIX, not the S&P.
Third, the price is now the price. SOXL closed at $225.79 on May 26, having started the year at $47.24. The same 75% monthly move that lifted the fund from $128 to $225 would take a holder buying today to something near $400, and it would require the same combination of low volatility and one-directional semiconductor strength to do it. 24/7 Wall St.’s own May 7 piece flagged the fund as “a tactical instrument for active traders due to volatility decay and symmetric downside, making it unsuitable for buy-and-hold investors”, and that framing has not changed because the chart looks different.
The honest read is that the 1,210% number is real, the mechanism that produced it is regime-dependent, and the regime is currently still cooperating. If the VIX climbs back into the 20s and stays there, or if a single bad guide from the basket’s largest weight cracks the AI capex story, the same 3x daily structure that minted the screenshot will run the projector in reverse. That is the indicator. That is the contract. Anyone telling you otherwise is selling you the chart.
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