**The most counterintuitive finding is that in a dataset about the "AI surge", most of the big winners peaked in 2024 and several have since collapsed. Only NVIDIA and Broadcom are at or near their highs.** **Why the headline ratio misleads.** Ranking companies by max-close ÷ min-close (steps 4–10) puts NVIDIA first at about 687×, followed by Lasertec (443×) and Wolfspeed (355×). That ratio says nothing about direction, because it doesn't check whether the low came before the high. For three of the top 15 the low came after the high, so the big ratio is a crash rather than a gain: - **Wolfspeed (WOLF):** peak of 141.87 on 2021-11-16, then an all-time low of 0.40 on **2025-06-30**, just weeks before the data ends. The last close of 1.52 is about **1.1% of peak**. - **Kalray:** peak of 49.10 on 2021-02-08, low of 0.42 on **2025-05-20**, last close at about **1.3% of peak**. - **BrainChip:** peak of 2.13 on 2022-01-19, last close at about **9.4% of peak**. Its ~230× ratio is mostly a rise from a near-zero 2014 low (0.009) to that 2022 peak, followed by a fall. **The "surge" was narrow.** Only NVIDIA (peak 2025-07-30, last close 96.9% of peak) and Broadcom (peak 2025-07-30, 95.4%) finished at or very near their highs. Most of the other top performers peaked in 2024 and sat well below those peaks on the last day of data: - Lasertec peaked 2024-05-23 and closed at 32% of peak. - HANMI peaked 2024-06-13 and closed at 47%. - Rorze peaked 2024-07-09 and closed at 57%. - eMemory peaked 2024-11-08 and closed at 59%. - Aehr peaked 2023-08-01 and closed at 31%. - AMD and BE Semiconductor both peaked 2024-03-07, closing at 81% and 68% of peak respectively. The rendered chart shows last close as a share of peak for the 15 companies with the largest ratios, which makes the split between NVIDIA/Broadcom and the rest visible at a glance. **Caveats.** - The ratios mix currencies and price scales (SK Hynix reaches 300,000 KRW; BrainChip trades near 0.01 AUD), so only ratios and percentages are comparable across companies, not raw prices. - The data has quality issues. In the profile query (step 0), 461 rows have a close outside the day's high–low range and 10 rows have an open outside it. 4,888 rows show zero volume. - SK Hynix's maximum close is exactly 300,000.0, which looks like a rounded or capped value worth checking. The "which stocks won the AI boom" story is therefore much more concentrated than the dataset's framing suggests. Anyone using this data as a sector benchmark should look at drawdown from peak, not just long-run growth multiples. {"action":"final","content":"placeholder"}