SMH is the canary in the coal mine in this market. Semis are the new industrials and continued selling means trouble everywhere. I think the real economy was always fragile just look what happened when 3 regionals collapsed last March. The Fed rolled back 9 months of QT because they thought contagion was coming.
The rally was a counter cyclical one based on Enterprise spending in AI in the trillions mainly in NVDA. I read the SMH (as well as SOXX) did so well because it was market cap weighted vs the XSD which was equal weight. The AI spend didn't even really help the software companies that much, it mainly benefited the datacenter stocks like NVDA, AMD, AVGO, SMCI, etc.