Micron, SanDisk, Nvidia and AMD rallied on Thursday, hours before Samsung's full second-quarter divisional report — the sector's first receipts test since a selloff erased more than $1 trillion from chip megacaps in a week. [1]

The damage ledger is dated. CNBC's Wednesday tally put the week's losses above $1 trillion after the July 28 Seoul crash — Samsung down 13.4 percent, SK Hynix down 14.7 percent — on Nvidia-financing fears and reports of Chinese DUV lithography progress. [2] Thursday's American bid arrived while Samsung's divisional detail was still unpublished. The bounce is a positioning record dated before the information it bets on.

That sequencing is the story. The crash was never about the current quarter; it was about whether high-bandwidth-memory demand is durable and whether Chinese supply is closer than priced. Samsung's full print, due Thursday, is the first document that can answer either question — and the rally placed its wager before the document existed. A floor found on faith is not a floor found on receipts.

Samsung's preliminary July 7 figures — roughly 89.4 trillion won in operating profit — are background, not the report. [2] What the divisional detail shows, and whether the Thursday bid survives it, is the next edition's record.

-- DAVID CHEN, Beijing