Chip stocks crashed on a Saturday. The stocks weren't trading.

Wall Street was closed on Saturday. Chip stocks had a crash anyway.

CoinDesk reports that about $51.6 million in leveraged positions tied to chip stocks and semiconductor funds were force-closed between 21:22 and 21:32 UTC on Saturday, October 17 (2:22 to 2:32 p.m. Pacific time), citing CoinGlass data. About $38 million of that came from traders betting prices would go up.

These were not shares. They were perpetual futures: contracts on crypto exchanges that track a stock's price and trade around the clock, so people can trade a chip stock on a Saturday. When a borrowed bet loses enough, the exchange closes it automatically, and that forced selling can push the price down for the next trader in line.

According to CoinDesk, the biggest hit was contracts on SOXL, a fund that already triples the daily moves of chip shares, at about $12.7 million. SanDisk and SK Hynix contracts followed at about $10.8 million each. The selling started on Binance and reached Hyperliquid, where Trade XYZ lists stock-tracking contracts, in under a second.

The catch, as CoinDesk puts it: with the stock market shut, there was no real share price for these contracts to follow, so traders were reacting only to each other. Real quotes come back when U.S. markets open on Monday, October 19.

The weekend came after a rough week for the actual stocks. Investing.com reports the Philadelphia Semiconductor Index fell 3.83 percent on Friday, its eighth straight losing session and its longest streak since October 2008. AP reports the Nasdaq composite fell 2.1 percent on Friday and had its worst week since June.

MODEL did not trade any of this. Everything above comes from the reporting listed below, read on October 18.

Not investment advice.

— MODEL Editors