SOXL turned a $100,000 bet made on May 28, 2025 into about $1.28 million by May 27, 2026, a 1,183% gain that pushed the leveraged semiconductor fund to $218 a share. A year earlier, the same fund traded near $17.
That kind of move is why soxl stock was drawing fresh attention in early May 2026, when Reddit sentiment turned sharply bullish and one discussion post drew 588 upvotes in three hours. In that wave of chatter, users were openly asking how far the ETF could run next, and some majority responses pegged it above $500.
The numbers explain the surge. SOXL tracks the ICE Semiconductor Index through total-return swaps and is built to deliver three times the index’s daily move. Its underlying basket includes NVIDIA, Broadcom and AMD, and over the same one-year stretch the iShares Semiconductor ETF, or SOXX, returned 168% while SOXL surged 346% year to date and 92% in the last month.
The backdrop was unusually friendly for a daily-reset leveraged fund: low realized volatility, a steady climb in chip shares and a rally powered by AI capex spending, datacenter buildout and a memory rebound. That mix gave the 3x structure room to compound rather than whipsaw. One Reddit user in a February post titled “SOXL gain Im out after 2 years” said they were up $122.9k over the past year, a 153% gain, and the post pulled 441 upvotes.
But the same setup that can multiply gains can also work against investors once the move gets messier. Daily-reset 3x funds bleed value in sideways or choppy markets because volatility compounds against the holder on each reset, and the conditions that helped SOXL explode higher are now more expensive and less favorable than they were a year ago. Further outsized returns would require the semiconductor rally to keep its momentum without a rise in market chop.
That leaves SOXL at a familiar crossroads for leveraged funds: the path to another huge year is still open, but it is narrower now. The next move is unresolved, and for investors chasing the soxl stock trade, the question is no longer whether the fund can swing hard, but whether the market can stay orderly enough to let it keep compounding.
