Not financial advice. TheGatBull does not provide investment advice.
Seoul will not produce a new price for four days. New York trades two more sessions in that stretch. What sets the value of those two days is something iShares has written down itself.
Measurement note: every Korean figure below is a KRX regular-session close at 15:30 KST. Every EWY figure is on a US trading day and is kept as a separate item; the two markets are never matched one-to-one by date. Won-to-dollar conversions all use ₩1,345.9, the Seoul 15:30 close of September 11, 2026 — we could not obtain the September 23 rate, so the base date is twelve days old and the converted figures are approximations.
The short answer
On Wednesday, September 23, 2026, Korea finished its last regular session before the Chuseok holiday. The KOSPI closed at 7,080.92, up 0.90%. That number is the last price Korea will publish for four days.
KRX is closed Thursday September 24 and Friday September 25 for Chuseok. With the weekend attached, Seoul stops for four straight days, September 24 through 27, and the regular session resumes on Monday, September 28.
But on two of those four days, New York is open normally. On September 24 and 25, US exchanges trade as usual. EWY — the iShares MSCI South Korea ETF, which holds Korean stocks and is listed in the US — keeps being bought and sold through both.
So for two days with no new Korean price at all, what sets EWY’s value?
Two things do. Neither of them is a Korean stock price.
- The market price is set by whoever wants to buy and sell EWY in New York.
- The net asset value (NAV) is — contrary to the common explanation — not simply pinned to the last Seoul close. iShares states on its own product page that it uses systematic fair value. That is an estimate.
What this means if you hold EWY
First: if EWY’s quote moves during those four days, that does not mean “something happened in Korea.” Korea is not pricing anything.
Second: Seoul’s first print on September 28 will not continue from the September 23 close. It starts from a level that has absorbed four days at once.
1. The last numbers Seoul leaves behind
The KRX regular-session closes from the last trading day before the holiday.
| Sept 23 close | Day | |
|---|---|---|
| KOSPI | 7,080.92 | +0.90% |
| KOSDAQ | 844.48 | +1.21% |
| Samsung Electronics | ₩285,500 (about $212) | +3.25% |
| SK Hynix | ₩1,862,000 (about $1,383) | +1.20% |
Look inside the day and the direction was not one thing. All four opened above the prior close, but they split on whether they held the opening.
| Opening gap | Own session | Day | |
|---|---|---|---|
| KOSPI | +1.94% | −1.02% | +0.90% |
| KOSDAQ | +0.88% | +0.33% | +1.21% |
| Samsung Electronics | +2.89% | +0.35% | +3.25% |
| SK Hynix | +3.21% | −1.95% | +1.20% |
The KOSPI’s opening price of 7,153.99 was its intraday high for the day. Its intraday low of 7,014.98 dipped briefly below the prior close. Samsung Electronics went the other way — its close was its high of the day, the only one of the four. (Highs and lows are intraday values and are not promoted to closes. The method for splitting a day this way is the same one we use in the weekly scoreboard.)
Why it gave part of it back we do not write. We could not obtain the investor-type flows or verify press explanations, and we do not fill an unconfirmed cause with a guess.
Either way, these closes now stand still for four days.
2. Four days — what the calendar has already settled
| Date | Day | Korea (KRX) | US |
|---|---|---|---|
| September 23 | Wed | Regular session — last before the holiday | Open |
| September 24 | Thu | Closed (Chuseok) | Open |
| September 25 | Fri | Closed (Chuseok) | Open |
| September 26 | Sat | Weekend | Closed |
| September 27 | Sun | Weekend | Closed |
| September 28 | Mon | Regular session resumes | Open |
Chuseok 2026 falls on Friday, September 25. The statutory holiday covers the day before, the day itself and the day after — September 24 to 26.
Monday, September 28 is not a substitute holiday. Article 3 of Korea’s Regulations on Public Holidays for Government Offices provides a substitute day when a Lunar New Year or Chuseok holiday period overlaps a Sunday. In 2026 the three Chuseok days are Thursday, Friday and Saturday, so no Sunday is covered. Overlapping a Saturday alone does not create one. The Korea Astronomy and Space Science Institute’s 2026 calendar likewise classifies September 24 to 27 as a four-day break and does not list the 28th as a public holiday.
Confidence: the statutory provision and the astronomical calendar above are as quoted by Korean press coverage. We did not read the enforcement decree or the calendar from the primary source, and we could not read the primary KRX holiday notice either. “Reopens September 28” rests on the premise that KRX follows the government-office holidays.
For a US reader, the two rows that actually matter are in the middle. On September 24 and 25, Seoul is shut and New York is open.
3. EWY stays open — so who sets the price?
EWY is an ETF listed on NYSE Arca. The fund does not rest because its underlying market does. On September 24 and 25, EWY trades as usual.
With no new Korean prices, there is exactly one thing setting EWY’s market price: the people who want to buy and sell it during those hours. Whatever they learn about Korea in that window — the exchange rate, semiconductor news, the direction of world equities — goes straight into EWY’s quote without passing through a Korean stock price first. We have written before about what happens when the two calendars fall out of step in the other direction.
The evidence that this is not an abstraction is already there, in two perfectly ordinary days that were not holidays at all.
| US trading day | EWY market close | EWY net asset value | Gap |
|---|---|---|---|
| Monday, September 21 | $189.16 | $189.77 | −0.32% (price below NAV) |
| Tuesday, September 22 | $192.62 | $191.22 | +0.73% (price above NAV) |
About 1.05 percentage points of movement in one day. On September 21 the market priced EWY below its net asset value; on September 22, above it.
Measurement basis: both values are in dollars and both are struck at 4:00 PM US Eastern time, so they can be set side by side. The September 22 NAV of $191.22 and the 0.59% expense ratio were read directly from the iShares page. The September 21 NAV of $189.77 is not a figure iShares published — we derived it from the posted one-day NAV change of +$1.45. And this gap figure is not the fund’s official premium/discount statistic; it is our own calculation combining two sources.
That much space opens on days when Korea traded normally. Across four days in which Korea publishes nothing at all, there is that much less to close it with.
4. NAV does not freeze — where most explanations go wrong
Here a common explanation needs correcting.
Articles about EWY during a Korean closure usually say: the underlying prices are stopped, so NAV is pinned to the last Seoul close, and only the market price moves, which is why the gap opens.
iShares does not say that. There are two sentences on the EWY product page.
“The ETF total return may appear to diverge from the return of its benchmark. This may be due to the use of systematic fair value.”
“The values shown for ‘market value,’ ‘weight,’ and ‘notional value’ … are based off of a price provided by a third-party pricing vendor … and do not reflect the impact of systematic fair valuation.”
Put plainly: when the fund strikes a NAV, using the stopped Korean prices as they are is not the default. Fair valuation is a procedure for estimating what a stock would be worth if Seoul were open right now, given what has happened in the world since it last traded.
So the NAV published across those four days is not a frozen Seoul close. It is an estimate.
What we confirmed stops at this: iShares discloses that it uses fair valuation. The formula, the trigger conditions, and whether it is in fact applied on Korean holidays — none of that is confirmed. We did not read the prospectus section that would contain it. So we do not say fair valuation is definitely applied across these four days. What is confirmed is that the tool exists and the fund says it uses it.
5. So what does this tell you about the Korean market?
What these four days expose is not Chuseok. It is two clocks that normally sit on top of each other, briefly coming apart.
The Korean exposure a US investor holds through EWY has a time when Seoul prices it and a time when New York prices it. Normally Seoul hands over a fresh price every night, so the two are never more than a day apart. On a weekend it becomes two days. At Chuseok it becomes four.
The longer that interval runs, the further what you hold drifts from Korean stock prices and the closer it gets to an estimate of Korean stock prices, plus the opinions of the people trading that estimate.
This is not a flaw in EWY. Every single-country ETF that crosses a border has the same structure. What is particular about Korea is that the interval widens on predictable dates by a predictable amount — Chuseok, Lunar New Year, and a handful of public holidays. The dates are published a year ahead.
🎩 Under the Gat — When Seoul reopens in four days, the KOSPI’s first print does not continue from 7,080.92. It starts from a level that has taken in, all at once, what New York priced during those four days, what the exchange rate did, and what the world learned in between. If you held EWY through the break, what you held was not the Korean market. It was Korea while the Korean market was shut.
6. What you own, and the US cousin
What is inside EWY, from the iShares disclosed holdings dated September 18, 2026: SK Hynix 24.54%, Samsung Electronics 21.97%, the two together 46.51%.
Those weights are as of September 18 and we did not re-fetch them for this piece. Two names being close to half the fund means that how those two open after four days will weigh on EWY out of all proportion to everything else. Our standing piece on how concentrated this ETF actually is has the full holdings picture.
Routes in: EWY trades in a US brokerage account like any stock. There is a separate path to SK Hynix itself, covered in our guide to buying it from the US. Samsung Electronics has no liquid US depositary receipt.
US anchor: the structural twin is EWJ during Japan’s Golden Week. While Tokyo is shut for several days, EWJ keeps trading in New York. Not a perfect parallel — Golden Week is longer, its composition shifts year to year, and Japan’s currency and market structure differ. We did not source EWJ figures for this piece, so we use the comparison for structure only.
An easier intuition: this is the weekend, enlarged. Between Friday’s Seoul close and Monday’s Seoul open, EWY already trades one day on its own. Chuseok just stretches that to two.
7. What we could not confirm
It is a long list, but writing it beats hiding it.
- We did not read the primary KRX holiday notice. The closure and reopening dates come from press coverage, quoted statute, and the astronomical calendar, cross-checked against each other.
- We did not read the fair-valuation section of the EWY prospectus. So we do not write how that procedure applies on Korean holidays.
- We could not obtain the September 23 Seoul closing exchange rate. All won conversions use the September 11 rate.
- We could not obtain the September 23 investor-type flows. So we do not write who bought or sold, or why the session gave part of the gap back.
- EWY’s September 21 NAV is derived, not published.
- The US session for September 23 had not opened as we wrote. New York’s answer to Seoul’s today does not exist yet.
The takeaway
Seoul closed at 7,080.92 today and will not update that number for four days. In the meantime New York trades two more sessions, and across those two days EWY’s price is set by US supply and demand while its net asset value is set by an estimation model.
The thing to check in four days is not how much EWY rose. It is how Seoul’s first print on September 28 settles the four days.
FAQ
Can I trade EWY while the Korean stock market is closed?
Yes. EWY is listed on NYSE Arca and trades on any day US exchanges are open. For the 2026 Chuseok closure that means Thursday September 24 and Friday September 25.
Exactly how many days is Korea closed?
KRX is closed Thursday September 24 and Friday September 25 for Chuseok, and with the weekend that is four consecutive non-trading days, September 24 to 27. It reopens Monday, September 28. September 28 is not a substitute holiday, because the 2026 Chuseok holiday does not overlap a Sunday. Press-reported, not confirmed from a primary source.
Is EWY’s NAV frozen at the last Korean close during the closure?
It is not that simple. iShares states on the EWY product page that it uses systematic fair value. So a published NAV may not be a straight copy of stopped Korean prices; it can contain an estimate. When and how that procedure is applied we could not confirm — we did not read the prospectus section.
Is it a problem when market price and NAV diverge?
Not by itself. It happens routinely in every ETF. On September 21 and 22, with Korea trading normally, EWY flipped from a 0.32% discount to a 0.73% premium in a single day. What changes during a closure is that there is less new information to close the gap.
Will there be a gap when Seoul reopens?
Seoul’s first print on September 28 does not continue smoothly from the September 23 close. It starts from a level that absorbs four days of FX moves, global equity moves and industry news at once. The size and direction cannot be known in advance.
Sources
- KRX closes and OHLC (KOSPI, KOSDAQ, Samsung Electronics, SK Hynix, 2026-09-23) — Yahoo Finance chart API, fetched directly. Symbols ^KS11, ^KQ11, 005930.KS, 000660.KS. Close timestamp regularMarketTime = 2026-09-23 15:32 KST. All figures on the KRX regular session; NXT volume not combined. Vendor-tagged market data, not an exchange-published original.
- EWY market closes (2026-09-21 and 09-22) — Yahoo Finance. The September 22 close is the 4:00 PM ET regularMarketPrice and was not cross-checked against the daily series.
- EWY NAV, expense ratio and holdings weights — iShares (BlackRock) official product page, read directly on 2026-09-23. NAV $191.22 as of 2026-09-22, one-day NAV change +$1.45, expense ratio 0.59%, weights as of 2026-09-18.
- Fair-valuation disclosure — quoted from that same page.
- Chuseok holiday and the substitute-holiday determination — press-reported, citing Article 3 of the Regulations on Public Holidays for Government Offices and the Korea Astronomy and Space Science Institute’s 2026 calendar. We did not read either primary text, nor the primary KRX holiday notice.
- Exchange rate — ₩1,345.9 per dollar (Seoul 15:30 close, September 11, 2026). The September 23 Seoul closing rate could not be obtained.
- Not claimed: that fair valuation is definitely applied across these four days; the cause of the intraday giveback on September 23; the September 23 investor-type flows; the September 23 exchange rate; any EWJ figure.
Not financial advice. This article is for information only. TheGatBull and its author hold no position in the securities mentioned unless disclosed. Confidence labels are as of publication.
Written by Mr.Gat — TheGatBull
Korean market coverage from a Seoul-metro-based operator who reads the filings in the original language. Every price on this site is the KRX regular-session close (15:30 Seoul); every figure states whether it came from a primary filing, the press, or our own calculation. Drafts are AI-assisted, then verified against the original Korean documents and edited by a human before publishing.
Found an error? Tell us — corrections get priority. How we work →