New Delhi, July 30 -- a miss.

The Korea Composite Stock Price Index fell 11 percent on Tuesday, its worst single-day loss in the benchmark's history, erasing approximately $2 trillion in market value, Nikkei Asia reported. The proximate cause was a quarterly earnings report from SK Hynix Inc. (000660.KQ) that showed operating profit of 60.54 trillion won, the equivalent of roughly $41.6 billion, a 557 percent year-over-year increase. The problem was that the number, extraordinary by any conventional measure, fell short of the consensus that had been built into the stock's price.

What collapsed on Tuesday was not a business. It was a narrative. The idea that SK Hynix, Nvidia Corp.'s primary supplier of the High Bandwidth Memory chips tha...