Brooks Macdonald CIO Sees Europe as a Safe Haven Amid the Chip Selloff

The global selloff in chipmaker stocks ran for another trading day, and the market is once again repricing the AI story. William Hobbs, chief investment officer at UK-based Brooks Macdonald, said on Bloomberg Television that European markets could become a safe haven for investors. His comment gives no percentage declines and names no companies. What it offers is a position: while semiconductors are in turmoil, it makes sense to keep part of your capital where dependence on a single theme is lower.

What exactly Hobbs said

Hobbs talked about the "AI trade": the market's big bet on companies that earn money from neural-network infrastructure, including chips, hardware and servers. According to Bloomberg, the chipmaker selloff is global and has now lasted more than a day. His main point concerns timing: "You need to build positions over the next few years to build resilience."

Note the horizon. This is not a call to lock in profits urgently or to exit semiconductors. Hobbs is talking about gradual accumulation, that is, diversifying with time to spare. For a private-capital manager, which is what Brooks Macdonald is, this is familiar language.

Why the focus turns to Europe

The analysis below is ours, not Hobbs's. European stock indices are built differently from American ones. They hold noticeably more banks, industrials, healthcare and consumer staples, and a smaller share of mega-cap AI companies. When chip stocks fall, that composition softens the hit to the index.

There is a caveat. Europe is not free of the semiconductor cycle. For example, the Dutch company ASML, a supplier of lithography systems to chip fabs, trades in Amsterdam and is sensitive to sentiment around the industry. So "safe haven" here means not immunity but lower risk concentration across the market as a whole.

What the report does not say

The source is very short, and it is important not to read too much into it. Here is what is known and what is left out:

• Speaker: William Hobbs, CIO of Brooks Macdonald.
• Event: the global selloff in chipmaker stocks continued for another day.
• Idea: European markets as a possible refuge.
• Horizon: the next few years, with gradual position building.
• Not disclosed: the depth of the decline, the list of affected stocks, the causes of the selloff, specific European assets.

How to use this signal

One TV comment is no reason to rebuild a portfolio. But it is a useful prompt to check your own concentration. If most of your capital, retirement savings or corporate stock options is tied to a handful of American AI names, the chip selloff shows how quickly that bundle stops being diversified.

In practice, that means three steps. Check what share of your portfolio sits in semiconductors and related companies, including funds that hold them under a different label. Decide how large a drawdown you can sit through without forced selling. And if you want to add Europe, do it in stages, as Hobbs suggests, rather than in a single entry amid panic.

For those who follow the industry rather than the quotes, the signal is different. The market keeps trading not the technology but expectations around it. Demand for AI accelerators and data centers does not vanish as a result, but the price of access to the theme swings more than the theme itself. Details of the selloff will emerge in later reports, and they will show whether this is a correction or a shift in sentiment.